C++ Things You Were Taught To Do Wrong

Whether you took a class or taught yourself, it’s likely that you learned some variant of “homework C++”, with the assumption that you would write differently in production code. But how do you learn to do that if it isn’t actually taught? Topics to be covered include using modern tooling, understanding and using smart pointers even with different arenas and custom free() functions, aggressively wrapping ugly or dangerous external interfaces, elementary cache behavior, and designing around high-level synchronization structures such as queues rather than low-level threading primitives.