2014-03-17

Unit testing with cpptest

Unit testing is a fundamental activity in software development, even if not as widespread as it should. As C++ has been around for quite some time, several libraries are available for carrying out this activity. This week I’ve had a look at cpptest. In the future, I plan to compare compare it to another pretty popular test library, googletest.

2014-03-10

The SQLite3 C++ API

I was looking for some practice with DBs, and my choice fell on the SQLite project, maybe only because it looked lighter than PostgreSQL, which I also plan to play with. My first general impression about the API is that it looks a little too much C-oriented, even though I am not sure whether this is a good or a bad thing, and I am ignorant about the latitude of choice an engineer has when designing an API that has to interact with applications written in either C or C++.

2014-03-03

Hash tables

Before C++11, hash tables could be used in C++ only with some tricks. The only associative container available in the STL used to be the std::map (along with its sibling, the multimap). This class, however, is implemented as a binary search tree, and does not provide a way to customize a hash function. What hurt me most was that you didn’t have the great performances offered by a true hash map: almost constant time insert, delete, and search (depending on how good is the hash function). You insert in O(log N) time. You find in O(log N) time. Too bad.

2014-02-24

STL Algorithms, part 5

In the previous post in the series, we have analyzed more algorithms from the STL considered to be part of the non-modifying sequence operations. In this post, we are going to show some use case for algorithms which fall into the modifying sequence operations.

2014-02-17

Iterators and Algorithms: Insert Iterator Adapters

This week I have had a look at two nice types of iterators: the move iterators and the insert iterators. Their main use seems to be related to STL algorithms.

2014-02-03

Accessing APIs

I was curious about all the great sites I know of releasing their API. Twitter, Google, Facebook, Yelp, are only a few examples of websites providing a way to access their services in a programmatic way. In this post, I have investigated a simple but very interesting API, offered by Rotten Tomatoes, a website about movies.

2014-01-27

Use files

Recently I’ve found myself in the common situation where I have to open a file and make something with its content. This is a basic task and should present no difficulties to a programmer; I happened, however, to get stuck for a while in search of a good way to carry out this apparently simple task. In particular, I have run into the recent addition of regular expression processing to the STL. Spoiler alert: I was not particularly happy of what I’ve found along the way.

2014-01-20

Time in C++

Using time: the chrono header

Until before the introduction of the chrono library in the STL with the C++11 standard, we were forced to deal with time in a couple of ways, notably using Boost or using some wrapper around the time.h library header, from C.

2014-01-14

STL Algorithms, part 4

We have seen some examples of usage of the find algorithm, with its variants find_if and find_if_not. In this installment, we are going to see other variants of finding algorithms, plus another algorithm useful when counting items in a sequence, count. Remember that we are still in the realm of non-modifying sequence algorithms (but see the discussion about for_each here).

2014-01-06

STL Algorithms, part 3

In the previous posts of this series, we have had a glance at non-modifying sequence algorithms, i.e., the algorithms that are supposed not to modify the elements of a sequence (or at least, the structure of the sequence; see the observations about for_each.

In this installment, as anticipated, we will start looking at the algorithms for searching.

Gianluca Ciccarelli

Engineer and Storyteller

Unit testing with cpptest

The SQLite3 C++ API

Hash tables

STL Algorithms, part 5

Iterators and Algorithms: Insert Iterator Adapters

Accessing APIs

Use files

Time in C++

Using time: the chrono header

STL Algorithms, part 4

STL Algorithms, part 3