This year, CppCon 2020 is going virtual. The dates are still the same – September 14-18 – and we are aiming for the CppCon live event to have pretty much everything you’re familiar with at CppCon except moved online: multiple tracks including “back to basics” and a new “embedded” track; live speaker Q&A; live talk time zones friendly to Americas and EMEA (and we’re going to try to arrange around-the-clock recorded repeats in all time zones, where speakers who are available can be available for live Q&A in their repeated talks too, and we’ll do that if it’s possible – but we’re still working on it!); virtual tables where you can interact face-to-face online with other attendees just like at the physical event; virtual exhibitor spaces where you can meet the folks on your favorite product’s teams to ask them question face-to-face; pre- and post-conference classes; and even the CppCon house band playing live before every plenary session. All talk recordings will be freely available as usual on YouTube a month or two after the event, but everything else above will be available only live during CppCon week.

To whet your appetite for this year’s conference, here’s another of the top-rated talks from last year. Enjoy – and register today for CppCon 2020 – all the spirit and flavor of CppCon, this year all virtual and online!

Mesh: Automatically Compacting Your C++ Application's Memory

by Emery Berger

Summary of the talk:

Programs written in C++ can suffer from serious memory fragmentation, leading to low utilization of memory, degraded performance, and application failure due to memory exhaustion. This talk introduces Mesh, a plug-in replacement for malloc that, for the first time, eliminates fragmentation in unmodified C++ applications through compaction. A key challenge is that, unlike in garbage-collected environments, the addresses of allocated objects in C++ are directly exposed to programmers, and applications may do things like stash addresses in integers, and store flags in the low bits of aligned addresses. This hostile environment makes it impossible to safely relocate objects, as the runtime cannot precisely locate and update pointers. Mesh combines novel randomized algorithms with widely-supported virtual memory operations to provably reduce fragmentation, breaking long-established worst-case bounds on memory efficiency with high probability. Mesh generally matches the runtime performance of state-of-the art memory allocators while reducing memory consumption and eliminating pathological cases; in particular, Mesh reduces the memory of consumption of Firefox by 16% and Redis by 39%. There are efforts underway to incorporate Mesh's approach to eliminate fragmentation into existing allocators like tcmalloc and jemalloc; Mesh itself is available at https://github.com/plasma-umass/Mesh, and it can be used just by setting an environment variable.