Embracing Modern C++ Safely

Chapter 2. Conditionally Safe Features

With great power comes great responsibility. Several modern C++ language features afford immense opportunities for expressiveness, performance, and maintainability; however, they come at a cost. For these features to add value without introducing unacceptable risk, they require a comprehensive understanding of their behavior, effective uses, and consequential pitfalls. This chapter introduces those C++11 and C++14 features that can yield significant, sometimes prodigious, benefits, yet are dangerous when used naively by the uninitiated; the sometimes-latent defects that result might not be discovered until much later in the software development life cycle. As these features offer a moderately high degree ...