When you explore a file format, you may find file signatures. A file signature is a sequence of bytes that used to verify the content of a file. A file signature may look as a sequence of “magic by...

I do not mean technical similarity, but the very principle of having a feature of this sort. Initially, the feature looks cool and can be used seamlessly “out of the box”. But when there is a need...

Once in a C++ chat, a guy asked whether it make sense to investigate and send bugfixes to existing compilers? There definitely must be a lot of people who want to fix bugs, and the issues just disa...

While developing my pet project, I encountered what I call the most vexing C++ rule in my experience, at least for modular programs. It is linker-specific and requires sort of secret knowledge to d...

This post was written under influence of a cool video from Jason Turner “A simplified implementation of std::function” Often people don’t think about how std::function works. Most people know th...

I wrote once about std::unreachable (aka __builtin_unreachable before C++23): link to the post. This command tells the compiler that the program will never get into this branch of execution (the p...

In C++, the switch operator is used to transfer the control flow to different locations depending on the value of the given variable. The switch statement is a correspondence between the values of ...

The [[nodiscard]] attribute was added in C++17. It is used to mark functions so that whoever called the function does not ignore the return value. In many environments, any warning breaks compilat...

Link to The Pragmatic Bookshelf. Introduction In the last few years, I have elaborated my own rule: the set of tests describes all possible use-cases that the program should be able to accompli...

One of the topics that is hardly noticeable in the world outside C++, but which causes a regular shitstorm among senior C++ contributors is the question of breaking the ABI. ABI (wiki) is a set of...