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This is the first in a series of articles on writing crossplatform applications with C++. These articles will be based on the premise that strict adherence to standard C++ will result in extremely portable code which will run on almost every platform available, including embedded systems.

However, limiting yourself to strict C++ also means limiting yourself to the standard C++ libraries, which only cover basic file and console input and output. That means no graphical user interfaces.

Pass by iterator is not a new concept, but one that we are going to perhaps give a new name to today and propose as a standard for normal usage.

If you take for example the normal way of passing around standard containers:

The idea of "Pass By Iterator" that we are proposing involves never again writing code like the above.

We've now completed 5 articles in the "Nobody Understands C++" series so here we are going to recap the misconceptions we have covered.

1. You shouldn't use all the language features of C++, that just makes your code too complicated! Wrong, we learned that by using some of the less used features of C++ we can make our code much more succinct.

On occasion you will read or hear someone talking about C++ templates causing code bloat. I was thinking about it the other day and thought to myself, "self, if the code does exactly the same thing then the compiled code cannot really be any bigger, can it?"

Here are the test cases presented, first without the use of templates, second with the use of templates. Exactly the same functionality and exactly the same code output:

Standard Algorithms

Few C++ developers seem to appreciate that the standard C++ library is actually designed around functional programming principles. The standard library headers algorithm and functional header files provide functional algorithms and facilitate their use, respectively.

As usual we will try to provide a simple example of why we should put to use the functional techniques in the standard library.

We've covered the "Assembly Language", "C" and "C++" of the C++ threading world, and now we are going to try and move beyond that.

In the "C++" example we showed a object that automatically managed a thread's life time and used the thread to calculate the Fibonacci sequence in the background. Using templates we should be able to make a generic version of the Fibonacci calculator thread.