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September 2016

Vcpkg: a tool to acquire and build C++ open source libraries on Windows--Eric Mittelette

By Marco Arena | Sep 20, 2016 01:42 AM | Tags: visual studio

The Visual Studio Team has announced the availability of Vcpkg, a tool which simplifies acquiring and building open source libraries on Windows.

Vcpkg: a tool to acquire and build C++ open source libraries on Windows

From the article:

Acquiring native libraries on Windows is a critical part of the application development process; in our surveys, you told us that 80% of your C++ projects depend on two or more libraries...

CppCon 2015 Boost Units Library for Correct Code--Robert Ramey

By Adrien Hamelin | Sep 16, 2016 01:44 PM | Tags: performance boost advanced

Have you registered for CppCon 2016 in September? Don’t delay – Late registration is open now.

While we wait for this year’s event, we’re featuring videos of some of the 100+ talks from CppCon 2015 for you to enjoy. Here is today’s feature:

Boost Units Library for Correct Code

by Robert Ramey

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

I will give a presentation on the Boost Units library.

This library implements a zero runtime facility for performing dimensional analysis checking and automatic units conversion on C++ expressions. I have found this indispensable for coding scientific programs involving a variety of complex physical units. The documentation of the Boost Units library is totally complete and accurate, but totally inpenetrable. I had to spend way too much time figuring out how to use this. By attending this meeting, you're going to avoid this pain and just get the benefit of simpler programs that contain fewer bugs.

CppCast Episode 70: Maintaining Large Codebases with Titus Winters

By robwirving | Sep 16, 2016 08:40 AM | Tags: None

Episode 70 of CppCast the only podcast for C++ developers by C++ developers. In this episode Rob and Jason are joined by Titus Winters from Google, about Google's strategies to maintain a 100M line monolithic codebase.

CppCast Episode 70: Maintaining Large Codebases with Titus Winters

by Rob Irving and Jason Turner

About the interviewee:

Titus Winters has spent the past 4 years working on Google's core C++ libraries. He's particularly interested in issues of large scale software engineer and codebase maintenance: how do we keep a codebase of over 100M lines of code consistent and flexible for the next decade? Along the way he has helped Google teams pioneer techniques to perform automated code transformations on a massive scale, and helps maintain the Google C++ Style Guide.

How to avoid bugs using modern C++

By Andrey Karpov | Sep 15, 2016 05:11 AM | Tags: c++17 c++11 basics

One of the main problems with C++ is having a huge number of constructions whose behavior is undefined, or is just unexpected for a programmer. Let's see which techniques in modern C++ help writing not only simple and clear code, but make it safer and more reliable.

How to avoid bugs using modern C++

by Pavel Belikov

From the article:

Of course, there are some flaws in the range-based for: it doesn't allow flexible management of the loop, and if there is more complex work with indexes required, then for won't be of much help to us. But such situations should be examined separately. We have quite a simple situation: we have to move along the items in the reverse order. However, at this stage, there are already difficulties. There are no additional classes in the standard library for range-based for. Let's see how it could be implemented.

CppCon 2015 Work Stealing--Pablo Halpern

By Adrien Hamelin | Sep 14, 2016 12:18 PM | Tags: performance community

Have you registered for CppCon 2016 in September? Don’t delay – Late registration is open now.

While we wait for this year’s event, we’re featuring videos of some of the 100+ talks from CppCon 2015 for you to enjoy. Here is today’s feature:

Work Stealing

by Pablo Halpern

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

If you've used a C++ parallel-programming system in the last decade, you've probably run across the term "work stealing." Work stealing is a scheduling strategy that automatically balances a parallel workload among available CPUs in a multi-core computer, using computation resources with theoretical utilization that is nearly optimal. Modern C++ parallel template libraries such as Intel(R)'s TBB or Microsoft*'s PPL and language extensions such as Intel(R) Cilk(tm) Plus or OpenMP tasks are implemented using work-stealing runtime libraries.

Most C++ programmers pride themselves on understanding how their programs execute on the underlying machine. Yet, when it comes to parallel programming, many programmers mistakenly believe that if you understand threads, then you understand parallel runtime libraries. In this talk, we'll investigate how work-stealing applies to the semantics of a parallel C++ program. We'll look at the theoretical underpinnings of work-stealing, now it achieves near optimal machine utilization, and a bit about how it's implemented. In the process, we'll discover some pit-falls and how to avoid them. You should leave this talk with a deeper appreciation of how parallel software runs on real systems.

Previous experience with parallel programming is helpful but not required. A medium level of expertise in C++ is assumed.

Visual C++ for Linux 1.0.5 Updates -- Marc Goodner

By Felix Petriconi | Sep 14, 2016 12:11 AM | Tags: None

The Visual C++ for Linux announcement post has been updated.

Visual C++ for Linux 1.0.5 Updates

by Marc Goodner

From the article:

We recently posted new bits for our 1.0.5 release of the Visual C++ for Linux extension for Visual Studio 2015. This release has some major performance improvements that feature incremental copy and build, and considerably reducing the number of connections to the remote Linux machine. We’ve also made significant improvements in IntelliSense since our last post here.

Exploring std::string--Shahar Mike

By Adrien Hamelin | Sep 13, 2016 12:40 PM | Tags: intermediate community

The insides are revealed:

Exploring std::string

by Shahar Mike

From the article:

Every C++ developer knows that std::string represents a sequence of characters in memory. It manages its own memory, and is very intuitive to use. Today we’ll explore std::string as defined by the C++ Standard, and also by looking at 4 major implementations.

Type annotation in C++--Stoyan Nikolov

By Adrien Hamelin | Sep 12, 2016 01:44 PM | Tags: intermediate efficiency

How do you do it?

Type annotation in C++

by Stoyan Nikolov

From the article:

In systems like game engines and our HTML renderer Hummingbird, developers have to work with objects transformed in different coordinate systems. Using one generic type can lead to confusion on what object is required in a particular situation. Errors are often subtle and hard to track. I tried to mitigate this by using stringent static typing in our software. New types are created by annotating them with metadata...