September 2013

A Tour of C++ -- Bjarne Stroustrup

tour.jpgBjarne Stroustrup's new book is now available:

A Tour of C++

by Bjarne Stroustrup

(see on Amazon)

From the announcement:

The tone of the book is set when the author uses an analogy to reference "A Tour of C++." He writes, "...think of a short sightseeing tour of a city, such as Copenhagen or New York. In just a few hours, you are given a quick peek at the major attractions, told a few background stories, and usually given some suggestions about what to see next. You do not know the city after such a tour. You do not understand all you have seen and heard. To really know a city, you have to live in it, often for years. However, with a bit of luck, you will have gained a bit of an overview, a notion of what might be special about the city, and ideas of what might be of interest to you. After the tour, the real exploration can begin."

Much of "A Tour of C++" is written as though the reader is having a friendly chat about C++ programming with the author.

C++ Papers for Chicago - Library

This is the third part of my series about the C++ papers for Chicago:

C++ Papers for Chicago: Part 3 - Library

by Jens Weller

From the article:

This week the C++ committee meeting has started in Chicago, and we will hopefully see at its end, what improvements C++14 brings to C++11. And in this 3rd part of my series for the Chicago papers, I will start looking at the library proposals...

New paper: N3774, C++ Needs Language Support For Vectorization -- Axel Naumann, Sandro Wenzel

A new WG21 paper is available. A copy is linked below, and the paper will also appear in the next normal WG21 mailing. If you are not a committee member, please use the comments section below or the std-proposals forum for public discussion.

Document number: N3774

Date: 2013-09-19

C++ Needs Language Support For Vectorization

by Axel Naumann, Sandro Wenzel

Excerpt:

In this paper we argue that vectorization is a very different concept to parallelization and needs to be supported explicitly by the language. The lack of C++ support for explicit vectorization costs factors (2 to 4 in real code) of performance on current commodity hardware. We demonstrate why we believe vectorization is a much needed language feature. The arguments presented in this paper are based on, and accompanied by, performance measurements of code used at CERN.

POCO 1.4.6p2 and Development Release 1.5.2 are available

Now available:

POCO Stable Release 1.4.6p2 and Development Release 1.5.2 Available

From the announcement:

Stable release 1.4.6p2 contains mostly bugfixes, upgrades to some bundled libraries (expat, zlib and sqlite) and a few new features (e.g. ColorConsoleChannel). ...

Development release 1.5.2 adds the MongoDB client library, contains significant updates to the JSON library, adds all changes from 1.4.6p2 and a whole lot of other improvements and fixes. ...

Startup Cloudius announces OSv, a new C++ open-source VM operating system

Froosv.PNGm Cloudius comes OSv: An alternative to Linux running in a virtual machine, written in modern C++. Cloudius is a startup formed by a group of ex-Red Hat OS virtualization experts.

Announcement: OSv, a new open-source operating system for virtual machines

InformationWeek, Charles Babcock: "Cloudius Takes On Linux as Cloud OS"

From the announcement:

Another refreshing feature of OSv is that is written in C++. It's been 40 years since Unix was (re)written in C, and the time has come for something better.

C++ is not about writing super-complex type hierarchies (as some people might have you believe). Rather, it allowed us to write shorter code with less boiler-plate repetition and less chances for bugs. It allowed us to more easily reuse quality code and data structures. And using newly standardized C++11 features, we were able to write safe concurrent code with standard language features instead of processor-specific hacks. And all of this with zero performance overheads -- most of C++'s features, most notably templates, are compile-time features which result in no run-time overhead compared to C code.

 

New paper: N3767, WG21 Teleconference 2013-09-13 Minutes -- Kyle Kloepper

A new WG21 paper is available. A copy is linked below, and the paper will also appear in the next normal WG21 mailing. If you are not a committee member, please use the comments section below or the std-proposals forum for public discussion.

Document number: N3767

Date: 2013-09-13

WG21 Teleconference 2013-09-13 Minutes

by Kyle Kloepper

This was the pre-Chicago WG21 administrative telecon.