Difference between revisions of "Cppreference:FAQ"

Revision as of 16:35, 30 June 2011

Template:cpp/sidebar

What is the purpose of this site?

Our goal is to have a website with a complete reference for the features in the C++ Standard Library, i.e. a more convenient version of the C++ Standard. Unfortunately this means that being a good educational resource is not among our objectives. It is assumed that the reader has good knowledge of C++ and has at least some experience. As a consequence, a lot of things, e.g. tutorials, comments about usage cases of one feature or another, detailed explanations of things that are implicitly clear to an experienced programmer, etc., are not included and should not be added. Basically, we try to keep things simple and clear for a programmer looking for reference of a feature he already knows.

Why the material here is limited to the C++ Standard?

In short, we chose quality over quantity. However, if someone is interested to do the hard work in writing the content, we could add the C language. Also, some boost libraries could also be candidates for inclusion since their reference documentation is often very inflexible and inconvenient.

Why does the English version of the site look better?

We use Mediawiki as the content management system in the English version of the site which allows more HTML stuff and has advanced template features, compared to Dokuwiki that still manages the other language versions. If you are interested to do the non-trivial amount of work in order to transfer any of these localized versions to Mediawiki, contact us and we would set up a new wiki in temporary location.

For convenience, you can download the archived version of the wiki here:

File:archive 20110625.zip (last update 25 June 2011)

The site is SLOW! Can you make it faster?

Sorry, there's not much we can do about that. Comparatively high resource usage is an inherent limitation of Mediawiki as it is quite heavyweight wiki system. The good news is that site slowness is temporary, since it is most likely caused by a recent configuration modification or an edit to a widely used template, which resulted in invalidation of the internal caches. The site will be slower only until the pages are cached again.

As a side note, logged-in users will always get worse experience since Mediawiki can not use the fastest caches to serve them. Hence it is a better idea to browse without logging in, as this would both make pages to load smoothly and lessen the load on the server.

What can I do with the material on this site?

The content is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA) and by the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) (unversioned, with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts). That means that you can use this site in almost any way you like, including mirroring, copying, translating, etc. All we would ask is to provide link back to cppreference.com so that people know where to get the most up-to-date content. In addition to that, any modified content should be released under a equivalent license so that everyone could benefit from the modified versions.

What? This is a wiki? Can I change stuff?

Absolutely. If you see something that is wrong, fix it. However, currently the wiki is limited to the C++ Standard Library, so you should not add stuff that is not in the standard C++. Also, please double check any changes with the Standard, since it is somewhat unintuitive in several places, so is this wiki. If you are unsure about anything, you can ask about it in the discussion pages.

How can I edit? What are the syntax rules?

This wiki uses Mediawiki, the same wiki system as the Wikipedia project. You can use their help pages to introduce you to the Mediawiki wikicode syntax.

However, most of the content in this wiki is wrapped in quite complex templates so the editing won't be easy even for those who know syntax. Fortunately, after the initial hard period you'll find that the current template system makes editing easier (what a paradox, isn't it?) by aggregating the repetitive stuff into one place, so when something is to be modified, there is no need to make the same modification tens or hundreds of times. For help about the templates used in this wiki, see Help:Templates.

Some high-traffic templates are locked in order to prevent vandalism or because of performance reasons. In these cases you should request a modification in the discussion page.

How can I contact you?

You can contact us at [email protected]