optional

I quite like the option of being able to program in a more functional style in C++. If you have the cycles to spare, or a sufficiently smart compiler and it allows you to say more with fewer keystrokes and better readability then why not? I haven't used it yet, but C++ Streams[1] is a header-only library that appears to have great ergonomics and an API that will feel familiar for those who know Java Streams. Since I haven't had the luxury of being able to use C++20 yet, I was unfamiliar with the ranges library. Starting at 1:06:00 you can see some motivating examples for those and they look great to me. Much easier to read than the equivalent STL. The libraries mentioned in the video TartanLlama/optional[2] and TartanLlama/expected[3] clearly demonstrate the value proposition (brevity and clarity) on their github pages. [1] http://jschein

Smart pointers have been an evolution, C++11 deprecated auto_ptr (gone in C++14), make_unique only came up C++14 due to an oversight on C++11, C++17 constructor type deduction makes everything more productive. Regarding memory and performance improvements std::string_view should better than using std::string, but don't go overboard replacing all code. It depends what kind of application you are writing, the age of existing code, or sometimes a plain old const reference might be enough. There are some ongoing efforts for such chaining http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2017/p079... https://github.com/TartanLlama/optional EDIT: corrected the make_unique/make_shared misinformation.