Caveat: It is not necessary to put the implementation in the header file, see the alternative solution at the end of this answer. Anyway, the reason your code is failing is that, when instantiating a template, the compiler creates a new class with the given template argument. For example: template<typename T> struct Foo { T … Read more
Overview Why do we need the copy-and-swap idiom? Any class that manages a resource (a wrapper, like a smart pointer) needs to implement The Big Three. While the goals and implementation of the copy-constructor and destructor are straightforward, the copy-assignment operator is arguably the most nuanced and difficult. How should it be done? What pitfalls … Read more
Common operators to overload Most of the work in overloading operators is boiler-plate code. That is little wonder, since operators are merely syntactic sugar, their actual work could be done by (and often is forwarded to) plain functions. But it is important that you get this boiler-plate code right. If you fail, either your operator’s … Read more
Introduction C++ treats variables of user-defined types with value semantics. This means that objects are implicitly copied in various contexts, and we should understand what “copying an object” actually means. Let us consider a simple example: class person { std::string name; int age; public: person(const std::string& name, int age) : name(name), age(age) { } }; … Read more
static_cast is the first cast you should attempt to use. It does things like implicit conversions between types (such as int to float, or pointer to void*), and it can also call explicit conversion functions (or implicit ones). In many cases, explicitly stating static_cast isn’t necessary, but it’s important to note that the T(something) syntax … Read more
Consider two libraries called Foo and Bar: using namespace foo; using namespace bar; Everything works fine, and you can call Blah() from Foo and Quux() from Bar without problems. But one day you upgrade to a new version of Foo 2.0, which now offers a function called Quux(). Now you’ve got a conflict: Both Foo … Read more
The compiler is allowed to make one implicit conversion to resolve the parameters to a function. What this means is that the compiler can use constructors callable with a single parameter to convert from one type to another in order to get the right type for a parameter. Here’s an example class with a constructor … Read more
A pointer can be re-assigned: int x = 5; int y = 6; int *p; p = &x; p = &y; *p = 10; assert(x == 5); assert(y == 10); A reference cannot be re-bound, and must be bound at initialization: int x = 5; int y = 6; int &q; // error int &r … Read more