Hangman 🎮️

A game🕹️ of hangman written in C++

Concepts and design decisions

std::string and std::string_view

• std::string allocates memory to own and modify its own copy of text, whereas std::string_view is a lightweight, read-only window that simply points to text owned by another string without copying it.
• Use std::string when a function needs to modify the text, return a brand-new string, or store the data long-term where it must outlive the original source. Use std::string_view for read-only function parameters, text-parsing loops, or string-slicing operations where you want to eliminate the performance cost of copying memory.

std::array and std::vector

• An elements cannot be added to an std::array at runtime, therefore it's mostly prefered over std::vector when the number of element in a list at compile-time is known.

Why we combine constexpr and inline

Before C++17, if you wanted to create a global constant in a header file to use across your entire project, you had a problem. If you just used constexpr:

// MyConstants.h
namespace Constants {
    constexpr double pi = 3.14159; 
}

If five different .cpp files included MyConstants.h, the compiler would create five separate copies of pi in memory. By adding inline, you fix this completely:

// MyConstants.h (Modern C++17 Way)
namespace Constants {
    inline constexpr double pi = 3.14159; 
}

Now, no matter how many files include this header, the compiler guarantees there is exactly one pi shared globally, and its value is known at compile-time.