Foreword

If you’ve ever asked “what’s in C++17 and what does it mean for me and my code?” — and I hope you have — then this book is for you.

Now that the C++ standard is being released regularly every three years, one of the challenges we have as a community is learning and absorbing the new features that are being regularly added to the standard language and library. That means not only knowing what those features are, but also how to use them effectively to solve problems. Bartlomiej Filipek does a great job of this by not just listing the features, but explaining each of them with examples, including a whole Part 3 of the book about how to apply key new C++17 features to modernize and improve existing code — everything from upgrading enable_if to the new if constexpr, to refactoring code by applying the new optional and variant vocabulary types, to writing parallel code using the new standard parallel algorithms. In each case, the result is cleaner code that’s often also significantly faster too.

The point of new features isn’t just to know about them for their own sake, but to know about how they can let us express our intent more clearly and directly than ever in our C++ code. That ability to directly “say what we mean” to express our intent, or to express “what” we want to achieve rather than sometimes-tortuous details of “how” to achieve it through indirect mechanisms, is the primary thing that determines how clean and writable and readable — and correct — our code will be. For C++ programmers working on real-world projects using reasonably up-to-date C++ compilers, C++17 is where it’s at in the industry today for writing robust production code. Knowing what’s in C++17 and how to use it well is an important tool that will elevate your day-to-day coding, and more likely than not reduce your day-to-day maintenance and debugging chores.

If you’re one of the many who have enjoyed Barteks’s blog (bfilipek.com, frequently cited at isocpp.org), you’ll certainly also enjoy this entertaining and informative book. And if you haven’t enjoyed his blog yet, you should check it out too… and then enjoy the book.

Herb Sutter, herbsutter.com