If you are a C programmer, you must be familiar with macros. They are powerful and can help you ease your work if used correctly. However, if you don't define macros carefully, they may bite you and drive you crazy. In many C programs, you may see a special macro definition which may seem not so straightforward. Here is one example:#define __set_task_state(tsk, state_value) \ do { (tsk)->state = (state_value); } while (0)There are many this kind of macros which uses do{...}while(0) in Linux kernels and other popular C libraries. What's the use of this macro? Robert Love from Google(...

On 15 Aug, 2012, GCC merged a patch--Merge from cxx-conversion branch . This means GCC will be compiled with C++ compiler in the future, it also means that GCC will be implemented using C++.You may have following two puzzles:Why does GCC turn to C++?Without C++ compiler, how can we compile C++ codes?Why using C++?In GNU's C++ Conversion, we can find this description in the background section:Whether we use C or C++, we need to try to ensure that interfaces are easy to understand, that the code is reasonably modular, that the internal documentation corresponds to the code,&n...

C++ is an very powerful programming language. It is efficient and flexible. When writing C++ programs, we may often need to process strings and often we need to check whether a string begin with some substring or end with some substring. We can use following functions to ahieve these:    static bool beginWith(const std::string str,const std::string needle){        return (!str.compare(0,needle.length(),needle));    }    static bool endWith(const std::string str,const std::string needle){       &...

Qt library is an excellent GUI library for C++ programmers developed by Nokia and now is an open source project. Often, we may use QPainter to draw strings, lines or images on a QWidget. We can override the QWidget's paintEvent() method when we want to use QPianter object to draw something on a QWidget.If we want to save the items drawn on QWidget as image for later reference, what can we do? We can save a QWidget as an image. Here is the code for achieving this:QPixmap pixmap(this->size());this->render(&pixmap);pixmap.save("test.png");Quite simple, right? Yes, these are all the code...

getaddrinfo is slower than ping when resolving domain names. I think ping uses gethostbyname to resolve a domain name. The question becomes whether getaddrinfo is slower than gethostbyname. After testing with both functions, we find that getaddrinfo is really slow compared to gethostbyname. By strace tracking,  we find getaddrinfo will communicate with DNS server 10 times and gethostbyname will communicate with DNS server communication twice.gethostbyname is an old way to resolve domain name, The disadvantage of it is that it does not support IPV6, so there is a gethostbyname2 which repla...

Prior to C++11, there is no built-in function in C++ standard library which can be used to convert numbers such as interger and double number to string.  There are many ways which can convert number to string. Since C++ is C compatible, we can use itoa() function to convert an integer to C style string. But this one can only convert integer to string, not double. For different types of numbers, we need to use different functions.string s = string(itoa(a));Actually, we can also use stringstream in C++ to convert number to string.  Also, here since we want to convert different types of...

In C++, there is a new mechanism for memory allocation and management. When we want to initialize an object, we can use new expression to get enough memory for storing an object and also initialize the object. When we want to create a new object, we can use new expression, for example:Obj *obj=new Obj;Basically, what the new expression does is to allocate enough memory for storing the obj object, in addition, it will initialize the object with some intial values.Also, there is an operator new existing in C++, what it does is to allocate raw memory. It only controls allocating memory, not inclu...

"The design and evolution of C++" is a book written by the inventor of C++  Bjarne stroustrup. In this book, Bjarne stroustrup presents the definitive insider's guide to the design and development of the C++ programming language. Without ommitting critical details or getting bogged down in technicalities, Stroustrup presents his unique insights into the decisions that shaped C++. In this book, some statements are very impressive. They are concise but convey much information. Here I summarize some statements which I like most in this book. A programming language can be the most important f...