RingBuffer

A modern, header-only C++ implementation of a fixed-size circular buffer (ring buffer), designed for performance, safety, and ease of testing with Google Test.

Features

• 🌀 Templated for any type T
• 🔄 Optional overwrite mode when full
• ⚡ Constant time push_back, pop_front, front, back, size, and capacity operations
• 📚 STL-style interface with iterators
• 🛡️ Fully exception-safe and compliant with C++17
• 🔗 Header-only for easy integration
• ✅ Unit tested with Google Test

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🔍 Modern C++ Highlights

This project demonstrates many modern C++ best practices:

Feature	Description
✅ Perfect Forwarding	Efficiently constructs elements in-place using std::forward
✅ constexpr if Branching	Compile-time control flow based on type traits
✅ Conditional noexcept	Automatically propagates noexcept based on value_type properties
✅ Exception Safety	Strong guarantees using RAII and manual object lifetime control
✅ Overwrite Mode	Enable circular overwriting when buffer is full
✅ STL-Compatible Interface	Supports begin(), end(), size(), empty(), etc.
✅ Unit Tested	With Google Test and FetchContent integration via CMake

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Getting Started

Prerequisites

• C++17 compatible compiler
• CMake 3.21 or newer
• Git (for GoogleTest fetch)

Build Instructions

git clone https://github.com/yourusername/RingBuffer.git
cd RingBuffer
mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
cmake --build .
ctest --output-on-failure

This will: 1. Fetch and build GoogleTest using FetchContent 2. Build the RingBufferTest executable from test_main.cpp 3. Run all unit tests

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Usage

#include "RingBuffer.hpp"

ring_buffer<int, 8> buf;

buf.push_back(42);
buf.push_back(1337);

std::cout << buf.front() << ", " << buf.back() << std::endl;

buf.pop_front();

With overwrite mode:

ring_buffer<int, 3, true> overwrite_buf;
overwrite_buf.push_back(1);
overwrite_buf.push_back(2);
overwrite_buf.push_back(3);
overwrite_buf.push_back(4); // Overwrites 1

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Project Structure

RingBuffer/
├── CMakeLists.txt       # CMake build config with GoogleTest support
├── RingBuffer.hpp       # Header-only ring buffer implementation
├── test_main.cpp        # Unit tests using GoogleTest
├── LICENSE              # MIT License
└── README.md            # This file

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License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.