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June 2017

CppCon 2016: The strange details of std::string at Facebook--Nicholas Ormrod

By Adrien Hamelin | Jun 21, 2017 08:00 AM | Tags: performance community

Have you registered for CppCon 2017 in September? Don’t delay – Registration is open now.

While we wait for this year’s event, we’re featuring videos of some of the 100+ talks from CppCon 2016 for you to enjoy. Here is today’s feature:

The strange details of std::string at Facebook

by Nicholas Ormrod

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

Standard strings are slowing you down. Strings are everywhere. Changing the performance of std::string has a measurable impact on the speed of real-world C++ programs. But how can you make strings better? In this talk, we'll explore how Facebook optimizes strings, especially with our open-source std::string replacement, fbstring. We'll dive into implementation tradeoffs, especially the storage of data in the struct; examine which standard rules can and cannot be flouted, such as copy-on-write semantics; and share some of the things we've learned along the way, like how hard it is to abolish the null-terminator. War stories will be provided.

CppCon 2017 Call for Poster Submissions

By Bob Steagall | Jun 20, 2017 11:12 AM | Tags: cppcon community

The next CppCon conference is in Bellevue, Washington September 24-29.

CppCon 2017 Call for Poster Submissions

by Bob Steagall

From the announcement:

Are you doing something really cool with C++? We want you to share it with the C++ community by creating a poster and presenting it at CppCon 2017.

The poster submissions deadline is July 23, with decisions sent by August 14.  For topic ideas, submission instructions, and advice on making the best possible submission, see the CppCon 2017 Poster Submissions page.

 

C++17 in details: language clarifications -- Bartlomiej Filipek

By bfilipek | Jun 19, 2017 04:02 AM | Tags: c++17

C++17 will make a few things more predictable and clarifies some of the usage.

C++17 in details: language clarifications

by Bartlomiej Filipek

From the article:

C++ specification is now clearer. We have now ways to assume Copy Ellison will happen, some orders of operations are well defined now, operator new is now aware of the alignment of a type and also exceptions are part of the function declaration.

Live Webinar: Developing C/C++ projects with CLion IDE and Conan C/C++ package manager--Kazakova

By Adrien Hamelin | Jun 16, 2017 12:09 PM | Tags: community

Learning about interesting tools!

Live Webinar: Developing C/C++ projects with CLion IDE and Conan C/C++ package manager

by Anastasia Kazakova

From the article:

This webinar will provide an introduction to developing large C/C++ projects using the package modularization and reuse offered by Conan package manager, and the power and convenience of the CLion IDE, using the CMake build system.

CppCon 2016: Bringing Clang and C++ to GPUs: An Open-Source, CUDA-Compatible GPU C++ Compiler--Lebar

By Adrien Hamelin | Jun 16, 2017 12:04 PM | Tags: performance community

Have you registered for CppCon 2017 in September? Don’t delay – Registration is open now.

While we wait for this year’s event, we’re featuring videos of some of the 100+ talks from CppCon 2016 for you to enjoy. Here is today’s feature:

Bringing Clang and C++ to GPUs: An Open-Source, CUDA-Compatible GPU C++ Compiler

by Justin Lebar

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

GPU computing has gone mainstream. It is a dominant part of the performance landscape, providing the initial 10x performance lift to a wide variety of applications. However, programing for GPUs can be extremely challenging. C++ is rarely available in an unmodified form, and there are few portable and open source approaches available. One of the most popular platforms, CUDA, has no production quality open source implementation. As a consequence, its C++ support has lagged behind and it has been a less appealing area for researchers and others that weren’t comfortable relying on NVIDIA’s tooling.

However, today things are different. Clang is now a fully functional open-source GPU compiler. It provides a CUDA-compatible programming model and can compile most of the awesome CUDA libraries out there ranging from Thrust (the CUDA-enabled parallel algorithms library that gave rise to the new parallelism technical specification) to Eigen and TensorFlow.

In this talk we will give an overview of how LLVM and Clang support targeting C++ to GPUs, how they work to be compatible with existing CUDA code, and how you can build your code today to run on GPUs with this open source compiler.

CppCast Episode 105: stlab Concurrency with Felix Petriconi

By robwirving | Jun 16, 2017 07:07 AM | Tags: None

Episode 105 of CppCast the only podcast for C++ developers by C++ developers. In this episode Rob and Jason are joined by Felix Petriconi to talk about his contributions to the stlab Concurrency library and the future of C++ futures.

CppCast Episode 105: stlab Concurrency with Felix Petriconi

by Rob Irving and Jason Turner

About the interviewee:

Felix Petriconi is working as professional programmer since 1993 after he had finished his study of electrical engineering. He started his career as teacher for intellectually gifted children, freelance programmer among others in telecommunication and automotive projects. Since 2003 he is employed as programmer and development manager at the MeVis Medical Solutions AG in Bremen, Germany. He is part of a team that develops and maintains radiological medical devices. His focus is on C++ development, training of modern C++, and application performance tuning. He is a regular speaker at the C++ user group in Bremen and a member of the ACCU’s conference committee.

CppCon 2016: extern c: Talking to C Programmers about C++--Dan Saks

By Adrien Hamelin | Jun 14, 2017 08:00 AM | Tags: None

Have you registered for CppCon 2017 in September? Don’t delay – Registration is open now.

While we wait for this year’s event, we’re featuring videos of some of the 100+ talks from CppCon 2016 for you to enjoy. Here is today’s feature:

extern c: Talking to C Programmers about C++

by Dan Saks

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

Most of us have heard this story. We’ve even told it ourselves…

C++ is nearly all of C, plus a whole lot more. Migrating code from C to C++ is pretty easy. Moreover, the migration itself can yield immediate benefits by exposing questionable type conversions that can be sources of latent bugs. After migration, the code performs as well in C++ as in the original C. And now that it’s C++, you have ready access to a wealth of advanced features you can (but don’t have to) use to implement enhancements.

Who wouldn’t want that? Legions of C programmers, apparently.

Despite the success of C++ in numerous application domains, C remains considerably more popular, especially in embedded, automotive, and aerospace applications. In many cases, projects resist C++ because their managers think the risks outweigh the benefits. In other cases, the resistance comes from programmers who persist in believing bad things about C++, even when those things aren’t true.

What can the C++ community do to overcome this resistance? Drawing on lessons from cognitive science, linguistics and psychology, and (of course) computer science, this talk offers suggestions about how to make the case for C++ more persuasive to C programmers.

High-Performance and Low-Latency C++ with Herb Sutter

By DavidF | Jun 13, 2017 01:16 PM | Tags: performance c++17 c++14

Join us for a 3-day training event with Herb Sutter in London, October 9-11, 2017

High-Performance and Low-Latency C++

About the training:

Welcome to a unique training with Mr Herb Sutter focusing on Efficiency, Concurrency, Parallelism, Modern Hardware, and Modern C++11/14/17. Participants of this intensive 3-day training will be given the knowledge and skills required to write high-performance and low-latency code using modern C++ on today´s systems.

Mr Sutter is the chair of the ISO C++ committee and best-selling author of four books and hundreds of technical papers and articles, including the essay “The Free Lunch Is Over”.

Intermediate to advanced C++ programming experience is required. Some experience with concurrency, parallelism, and/or multiprocessing in e.g. Java, C, C++ or similar language is recommended, but not required.

Don’t miss out on the opportunity to attend this three day course, to be held in London on the 9th – 11th October, 2017. Please notice there are a limited number of seats.

Overload 139 is now available

By Adrien Hamelin | Jun 13, 2017 12:44 PM | Tags: community

ACCU’s Overload journal of June 2017 is out. It contains the following C++ related articles.

Overload 139 is now available

From the journal:

I am not a number
Description : When is a number not a number? Frances Buontempo counts the ways this happens. by Frances Buontempo

Allocator for (Re)Actors with Optional Kinda-Safety and Relocation
How do you deal with memory for (Re)Actors? Sergey Ignatchenko proposes an allocation scheme. by Sergey Ignatchenko

Initialization in C++ is Bonkers
Uninitialised variables can cause problems. Simon Brand reminds us how complicated it can get. by Simon Brand

Vulkan and you – Khronos’ successor to OpenGL
Various graphics APIs exist. Andy Thomason unravels the mysteries of Vulkan, the latest 3D Graphics API from Khronos, the custodians of OpenGL. by Andy Thomason

Kotlin for C++ Developers
What could a language the originated on the JVM possibly offer C or C++ devs? Hadi Hariri tells us. by Hadi Hariri

Getting Tuple Elements with a Runtime Index
Accessing a tuple with a runtime index is a challenge. Anthony Williams shows us his approach. by Anthony Williams

Afterwood
What makes programming fun? Chris Oldwood ponders what floats his boat. by Chris Oldwood