cereal 1.0.0 is available

By Blog Staff | Mar 28, 2014 11:08 AM | Tags: None

cereal 1.0 is available:

cereal - A C++11 library for serialization

cereal is a header-only C++11 serialization library. cereal takes arbitrary data types and reversibly turns them into different representations, such as compact binary encodings, XML, or JSON. cereal was designed to be fast, light-weight, and easy to extend -- it has no external dependencies and can be easily bundled with other code or used standalone.

... cereal uses features new to C++11 and requires a fairly compliant C++ compiler to work properly. cereal has been confirmed to work on g++ 4.7.3, clang++ 3.3, and MSVC 2013 (or newer). It may work on older versions, but there is no emphasis on supporting them. cereal works under both libstdc++ and libc++ when compiling with g++ or clang++.

CppDepend 4 Released

By James | Mar 27, 2014 04:01 PM | Tags: None

CppDepend allows architects and developers to analyze a code base, automate code reviews, and facilitate refactoring and migration. It’s based on Clang for more reliability and lets queries the code base over LINQ queries thanks to CQLinq.

New features in CppDepend v4.0 include:

• A new dashboard panel that shows the state of the current code base at a glance as well as a comparison to a baseline.
• Monitoring trends on 50 default “Trend Metrics” as well as custom trend metrics. These can be displayed through Trend Charts.
• Focus on recent rules violations (by using filters) that occur on code elements added or re-factored since a baseline.
• Listing rules and queries according to common criteria, and quickly listing all violated rules.
• Major UI enhancements and modernized menu organization.
• Enhanced and redesigned reports include trend metrics charts and more information.

Open Source licenses are available free to non-commercial open source software development projects. For more details, please see the Open Source project license terms.

Control Structures in C++ -- Prashant Sharma

By prashant0788 | Mar 27, 2014 03:24 PM | Tags: basics

[For very new programmers, this is a basic review of the control flow language features available in C++ -- most of them also valid C, but at our request now with coverage also of the C++-specific range-for loop. -- Ed.]

Now on life`n`gadget:

Control Structures in C++ (Flow of Control)

by Prashant Sharma

From the article contents:

1 Control Structures in C++

1.1 Introduction

1.2 Selection Structure (Branching Statements)

1.2.1 if Statement

1.2.2 if-else Statement

1.2.3 Nested if else Statement

1.2.4  switch Statement

1.2.4.1 switch vs if-else

1.3 Looping Structure(Iterative Statements)

1.3.1 Elements of Looping Structure

1.3.2  for-loop

1.3.3 Range-for statement (range based for-loop) New C++11 Feature

1.3.4 while-loop

1.3.5 do-while loop

1.3.6 Related

The Mixed Blessings of Compatibility -- Andrew Koenig

By Blog Staff | Mar 27, 2014 02:51 PM | Tags: None

New on Dr. Dobb's:

The Mixed Blessings of Compatibility

by Andrew Koenig

From the article:

Last week, I discussed the social pressures against changing the behavior of any system, even if the change is an improvement. I want to continue that discussion by exploring the implications of C++'s intent to act as an extension to C.

Oracle Studio 12.4 Beta release with C++11

By SteveClamage | Mar 27, 2014 12:47 PM | Tags: None

The Oracle Solaris Studio 12.4 Beta is now released and available for download.

Supported platforms:

• Solaris 10u10 and Solaris 11 on SPARC and x86
• Oracle and Red Hat Linux 5.8 through 5.10
• Oracle and Red Hat Linux 6 through 6.5

This release features:

• New C++ compiler and dbx debugger that support the C++ 2011 language standard
• A completely redesigned Performance Analyzer UI that simplifies identification of key performance issues, plus remote data analysis, cross-architecture support, comparison of results, and improved kernel profiling
• Code Analyzer for improving your application with static source-code checking, run-time memory access checking (including memory leaks), and identification of un-exercised code.  Graphical user interface and command-line provide robust interfaces for reviewing results and historical analysis of data
• Compiler and library optimizations for Oracle's SPARC T5, M5, M6, Fujitsu's M10, and Intel's Ivy Bridge servers
• Support for new OpenMP 4.0 standard including Region Cancellation, Thread Affinity, Tasking Extensions and Sequentially Consistent Atomics
• Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that includes C++ 2011 support, improved response time, and a smaller memory footprint to efficiently handle very large source repositories.

For a complete listing of the new and enhanced features in this release, see the Oracle Solaris Studio 12.4 What's New.

C++ Status

By Meeting C++ | Mar 27, 2014 08:02 AM | Tags: standardization c++17 c++14 c++11 basics advanced

A follow up on my proposal series & C++14 post:

C++ Status

by Jens Weller

From the Article:

This is the followup I promised after my last series for Issaquah. The current status of the standardization is that C++14 is on its final way to become a new ISO Standard, as you can see on the C++ Status Page of isocpp.org.

CppCon 2014 Call for Submissions

By Blog Staff | Mar 25, 2014 06:25 AM | Tags: None

CppCon announced today:

CppCon is the annual, week-long face-to-face gathering for the entire C++ community. The conference is organized by the C++ community for the community and so we invite you to present.

Have you learned something interesting about C++, maybe a new technique possible in C++11? Or perhaps you have implemented something cool related to C++, maybe a new C++ library? If so, consider sharing it with other C++ enthusiasts by giving a talk at CppCon 2014. Submissions deadline is May 15 with decisions sent by June 13. For topic ideas, possible formats, and submission instructions, see the Submissions page.

From the Submissions page:

Submissions

CppCon is organized by the C++ community for the community and so we invite the community to present.

Who Should Submit?

You. If you have something interesting to share with the C++ community then consider presenting. Our goal is to create the best program that we can and we feel that there must be room for both seasoned presenters and new voices.

Topics

We are open to any topic that will be of interest to a mainstream C++ audience. Below are some ideas.

• C++11
• C++ libraries and frameworks of general interest
• C++14 and new standardization proposals
• Parallelism/multi-processing
• Concepts and generic programming
• Functional programming
• High performance computing
• Software development tools, techniques, and processes for C++
• Practical experiences using C++ in real-world applications
• Industry-specific perspectives: mobile and embedded systems, game development, high performance trading, scientific programming, robotics, etc.

Format

Standard presentation sessions are one hour long (including Q&A). We can accommodate half hour sessions and multi-hour submissions. Note that multi-hour submissions may be harder to accommodate. Please indicate your flexibility.

We will also have Lightning Talks, but they need not be submitted in advance. We will share more information about Lightning Talks and other opportunities for Open Content in time for you to plan your participation.

Speaker Registration

Half and full session speakers will have their conference registration fee waived (one speaker per session). If you are planning to submit a proposal, please do not register for the conference at this time. You’ll be contacted with special registration instructions later.

Further financial assistance is available to all speakers. Details are provided on request.

Submitting

Please include:

• Session Information:
  • Session Title
  • Session Type: lecture, panel, tutorial, workshop, case study, demonstration, etc.
  • A one or two paragraph abstract, suitable for the conference web site
  • Optimum, minimum, and maximum length (these may be the same); see Format above
  • Level/Audience: basic, intermediate, advanced, library authors, game developers, etc.
  • Whether you allow us to record your session
  • Session materials that will be available at conference time (slides, source code, etc.)

• Presenter Information:
  • A short biography, suitable for the conference web site
  • A headshot photo of about 150 x 150 (will be contacted for it separately)
  • Your public contact information (twitter handle, blog, website, google+ page, etc)
  • Your private contact information (at least email, will not be made public)

All submissions should be made through the EasyChair conference management system. If you have not already registered at EasyChair, you will need to do so in order to submit your proposal. All submissions will go through a peer review process.

Presenters are encouraged, but not required, to submit slides and source code for distribution to attendees and to agree to have their sessions recorded. Presenters must agree to grant a non-exclusive perpetual license to publish submitted and/or recorded materials, either electronically or in print, in any media related to CppCon.

If you have any questions about the submission process, please contact the Program Committee. If you have any technical problems with EasyChair, please contact them for help.

Dates

Submission deadline: 15 May 2014
Decision notifications by: 13 June 2014
Program available online: 27 June 2014

For a chronological view of all the key dates, refer to the CppCon 2014 Timeline.

HPX version 0.9.8 released -- STE||AR Group

By Hartmut Kaiser | Mar 24, 2014 02:57 PM | Tags: performance parallelism distributed computing concurrency c++14 c++11

The STE||AR Group has released V0.9.8 of HPX -- A general purpose parallel C++ runtime system for applications of any scale.

HPX V0.9.8 Released

The newest version of HPX (V0.9.8) is now available for download! Please see here for the release notes.

HPX now exposes an API fully conforming to the concurrency related parts of the C++11 and the draft C++14 standards, extended and applied to distributed computing.

From the announcement:

• A large part of the code base of HPX has been refactored and partially re-implemented: the threading and networking subsystems have been improved in performance, modularity, and robustness, the API was improved for closer conformance to the concurrency related parts of the C++11 and C++14 draft standards and the upcomming Concurrency TS.
• We added new API functionality like hpx::migrate and hpx::copy_component which are the basic building blocks necessary for implementing higher level abstractions for system-wide load balancing, runtime-adaptive resource management, and object-oriented check-pointing and state-management.
• We improved the distributed reference counting scheme used by HPX which helps managing distributed objects and memory.

Quick Q: Is std::array movable any better than a plan C array? -- StackOverflow

By Blog Staff | Mar 24, 2014 12:46 PM | Tags: None

Quick A: Yes.

Today on SO:

Move constructors and std::array

According to N3485 §23.3.2.2:

(...) the implicit move constructor and move assignment operator for array require that T be MoveConstructible or MoveAssignable, respectively.

So, std::array supports move semantics if the type of its elements does. Great!

However, what does this really mean? I tend to picture this type as a safer version of an array providing an STL-compliant interface but, if this is true, then how can an std::array move-construct its elements? Can I do the same with an ordinary array?

Announcing the C++ FAQ

By Herb Sutter | Mar 21, 2014 11:25 AM | Tags: None

In addition to CppCon announced earlier this week, today the Standard C++ Foundation is pleased to announce a new unified C++ FAQ. The following introduction was written by Herb Sutter.

For the past 18 months, a small group of us led by Marshall Cline and myself have been hard at work on making a unified C++ FAQ available here at isocpp.org, as a wiki whose editing can be crowdsourced to keep it up-to-date with current information about modern C++.

The unified modern C++ FAQ is now ready to launch, and you can find the current content here:

C++ FAQ

The following is some background information about this project.

History and Goals

Until now, there have been several different overlapping FAQs, including notably:

• Bjarne Stroustrup’s FAQ pages
• Marshall Cline’s popular C++ FAQs Online
• at least three different StackOverflow C++ FAQs in some form, last time I looked
• and many others

However, in practice we noticed several difficulties with this status quo:

1. Fragmentation: The existing FAQs are fragmented, so people often have to consult several of them in order to find a single answer. On the other hand, they frequently also overlap in their contents, which creates redundancy and sometimes inconsistent treatments of the same question.
2. Staying up to date: They all (even Bjarne’s) contained some out-of-date material, because it’s just hard work for a single author or small group to maintain a good and always-updated FAQ.
3. Legacy search rank: When people search for information about C++, search engines often lead to pages that are highly ranked because they are well established -- they have been available for a long time and are widely linked-to. But since C++11 in particular has changed modern C++ style and recommendations, much of this popular information has now become dated or incomplete.

To improve this, here are the following major goals of the new FAQ and how we are achieving them:

1. Solve the fragmentation problem: Provide a unified merged FAQ, starting as a union of Marshall’s and Bjarne’s FAQs. Marshall and Bjarne (and Addison-Wesley) have graciously agreed to provide their FAQ contents as seed material to be the initial content of the FAQ. Marshall Cline has worked hard to import his FAQ into the new FAQ via his automated tools, and I have recently completed hand-editing over 50,000 words of Bjarne’s FAQ into the new FAQ wiki structure.
2. Solve the up-to-dateness problem: Provide wiki-based crowdsourced editing and maintenance. Any qualified C++ expert can and should be able to add to and improve the FAQ -- including all committee members and the scores (possibly hundreds) of regular high-quality contributors on StackOverflow and other sites. Marshall Cline in particular has worked tirelessly for the past year to produce a robust wiki-based mechanism with good collision detection and resolution. (Note: Much of the imported FAQ information has already been updated, but much still needs to be done -- you can help by using the "recommend an improvement" on any FAQ title to let us know. More on that feature below.)
3. Solve the legacy websearch problem: When people search for C++ information, they should quickly get to the latest isocpp.org FAQ. This will be simple thanks to Marshall’s and Bjarne’s cooperation: Currently much of the websearch traffic goes to their FAQs because of their long history and pagerank. Both Marshall and Bjarne will be updating their FAQs to either forward or link to the new FAQ on a per-FAQ level. (To enable this, we have maintained the internal FAQ tags Marshall was already using, and I kept a careful index mapping from Bjarne’s FAQ pages#tags to the new tags so that he can easily provide redirects.) This way, the isocpp.org FAQ should quickly become the de facto top search result for C++ FAQs and other C++ information.

We’re also trying to provide additional features:

• Provide new FAQ sections for community information. This includes things like "User Groups Worldwide" and "Partial List of ISO C++ Committee Members" FAQ sections.
• Provide new FAQ sections for "What's new in C++11" and "... in C++14." This makes it easier to see "What's different if I already know [a certain previous standard supported by my compiler]."
• Provide new FAQ sections for "C++ for {C#/Java | Objective-C | C | C++98 } developers." Some of these have already been created with seed content, but need more information from experts in those areas. We hope crowdsourcing will fill this gap relatively quickly; one new FAQ per contributor scales really well with lots of contributors while being a light load for everyone.
• Provide a new FAQ section for "C++ Myths and Urban Legends." This will help socialize correct information by providing answers to common objections and misconceptions. C++ isn’t perfect and shouldn’t be presented that way, but it’s not nearly as imperfect as frequent incorrect claims would make it out to be. Misinformation helps no one, and we can deal with common misunderstandings here. Again, this currently contains some seed content; more to come.
• Provide a way to subscribe to the latest/freshest information: RSS feed for FAQ changes. We've created an RSS feed for FAQ change diffs (link also available in left sidebar while in the FAQ) so that anyone can subscribe to a stream of diffs of current changes as they happen, including new FAQs and updates to existing FAQs. In the past, updates to the preexisting FAQs were often buried and undiscoverable, making them less useful than they could be. This way, people who care can easily be informed about new material, and suggest further edits.
  
• Provide a way for anyone, not just FAQ editors, to suggest improvements. If you hover over any FAQ's title bar, you will see not only a permalink icon, but also an icon where you can "recommend an improvement to this FAQ" including to suggest new FAQs not yet in the list.

• Provide a "moderated/curated" experience by having designated FAQ editors, but allow lots of people to become FAQ editors. Today there are already over 50 FAQ editors. If you offer good suggestions via the public "recommend an improvement" links, it probably won't be long before you start seeing Edit links appear when you visit the FAQ pages.
• Provide a FAQ Discussion forum. For those interested in minutiae or sending suggestions directly to FAQ editors, you can subscribe to the faq-discussion forum, also available by email at [email protected] (email [email protected] to subscribe by email).

Acknowledgments

Our huge thanks go out to Marshall Cline who has put in a vast amount of volunteer work to make this possible, and also to Bjarne Stroustrup, Eric Niebler, Marshall Clow, Peter Gordon, Pearson/Addison-Wesley and the many other FAQ editors who have already made improvements -- all of these people have already contributed a lot of work and help to this. Thank you! And thanks again to everyone who has worked hard to make this possible.

Herb