Rainer Grimm - The C++ Standard Library (2d Ed., including C++ 17)

Rick Audet

Senior Engineer, Dolby Laboratories

Odin Holmes

CEO/CTO at Auto-Intern GmbH

Ramon Wartala

Director Technology at Performance Media GmbH

The C++ Standard Library is a quick reference to the standard library of the current C++ standard C++17 ISO/IEC 14882:2017. C++17 has more than 1600 pages and it next big C++ standard after C++14. C++14 is a small addition to C++11. C++11 had more than 1,300 pages and was published 2011. That was 13 years after the first and only C++ standard C++98. Of course, there is also C++03, published in 2003. But C++03 is considered a bug fix release.

The goal of this quick reference is to provide a concise reference of the C++ standard library. This book assumes that you are familiar with C++. If so you will get the most benefit out of this book. If C++ is new to you, you should start with a textbook about core C++. Once you have mastered a textbook about the core language, you can make your next big step by reading this book. To make your job easier, I have provided a lot of short code snippets to connect theory and practice.

The book should be a reference for C++, and should, therefore, have an index. Leanpub does not support the creation of an index. So Ive made it based on regular expressions, naming conventions, a lot of python magic - dont blame me - and a long, long table which I had to split for each page. Here is the problem. The index is only fully available in the pdf format of the book.

I promise only a few conventions.

I use boxes for unique information, tips, and warning.

Information text.

Tip description.

Warning description.

I dislike using directives and declarations because they hide the namespace of the library functions, but because of the limited length of a page, I have to use them from time to time. I use them in such a way that the origin can always be deduced from the using directive (using namespace std;) or the using declaration (using std::cout;).

Only header files of the featured functionality are shown in the code snippets. True or false is displayed in the output code snippets for boolean values; and
is not used.

To be concise, I only present short code snippets in this books. The name of the entire program is in the first line of the code snippet.

I call instances of fundamental data types values, which C++ inherited from C. Instances of more advanced types which often consist of fundamental types, are called objects. Objects are typically instances of user defined types or containers.

At first Alexandra Follenius, who was the lector at OReilly for the German book C++ Standardbibliothek. You may have guessed that the German book is the ancestor of this book. For my book C++ Standardbibliothek Karsten Ahnert, Guntram Berti, Dmitry Ganyushin, Sven Johannsen, Torsten Robitzki, Bart Vandewoestyne, and Felix Winter were very valuable proofreaders. A lot of thanks to all of them.

For translating this book to English, I started a request in my English blog: www.ModernesCpp.com. I received a much higher response than I expected. Special thanks to all of you, including my son Marius, who was the first proofreader.

Here are the names in alphabetic order: Mahesh Attarde, Rick Audet, Pete Barrow, Michael Ben-David, Dave Burns, Alvaro Fernandez, George Haake, Clare Macrae, Arne Mertz, Ian Reeve, Jason Turner, Bart Vandewoestyne, Ivan Vergiliev, and Andrzej Warzynski.

The idea of the book is quite easy to paraphrase: What every professional C++ programmer should know about the C++ standard library. Because of this intention, I left a lot of answers unanswered; therefore, I provide you with the links to the details at the very beginning of each new topic. The link will be referring to the excellent online resource www.cppreference.com.

Who can characterise C++11 better than Bjarne Stroustrup, creator of C++:

Surprisingly, C++11 feels like a new language: The pieces just fit together better than they used to and I find a higher-level style of programming more natural than before and as efficient as ever. (Bjarne Stroustrup, http://www.stroustrup.com/C++11FAQ.html)

Bjarne Stroustrup is right. C++11 feels like a new language, because it has a lot to offer in addition to classic C++. This is true for the core language and is even more true for the improved and extended standard library. The regular expression library for the manipulation of text, the type-traits library to get, compare or manipulate types, the new random numbers library or the chrono library are all new with C++11. But thats not all. There are the smart pointers for automatic memory management and the new containers