Summary

In this chapter, we took a look at fundamental ideas of the C++ language such as: what is an object? What are pointers and references? What do we mean when we talk about the size and alignment of an object or of a type? Why are there no zero-size objects in C++? What are the special members of a class and when do we need to write them explicitly? This non-exhaustive list of topics gave us a common vocabulary from which to build what you, dear reader, will find in the chapters to come.

With this, we are ready to get our hands dirty, so to speak. We have given ourselves a set of low-level tools and ideas from which to build higher-level abstractions, but we have to give ourselves some measure of discipline.

The next chapter will discuss some things we need to avoid. Those include undefined behavior, implementation-defined behavior (to a lesser extent), ill-formed no-diagnostic-required code, buffer overflows, and other unrecommendable behaviors.

Then, we will follow...