Firsts in 2020 (or, A little dose of good news)

by Herb Sutter

2020 has been mostly terrible. That includes for the C++ committee and many of our communities, where just this month we lost Beman Dawes. Beman was one of the most important and influential C++ experts in the world, and made his many contributions mostly behind the scenes. I and everyone else who has ever benefited from any of the standardized STL, Boost, C++Now, std::filesystem, C++98/11/14/17, and more — so, really, most people who have ever used C++ — all owe Beman a debt of gratitude. We miss him greatly.

To end the year with a little dose of good news, I thought I’d mention a just few positive C++ accomplishments that did happen for 2020, and were happier “first-ever” achievements.

First, the big one…

One Trick with Private Names and Function Templates

by Bartlomiej Filipek

Last time in my blog post about How to Share Code with Const and Non-Const Functions in C++ I had a custom type declared and defined in one place (like in a header file). Recently, I tried to separate the declaration from implementation, and I got into a situation where one private function template was left.

In this article, I’d like to show you one trick that allowed me to convert this function template into a non-member function without giving up private details of the class...

Interactive C++ for Data Science

by Vassil Vassilev, David Lange, Simeon Ehrig, Sylvain Corlay

In our previous blog post “Interactive C++ with Cling” we mentioned that exploratory programming is an effective way to reduce the complexity of the problem. This post will discuss some applications of Cling developed to support data science researchers. In particular, interactively probing data and interfaces makes complex libraries and complex data more accessible users. We aim to demonstrate some of Cling’s features at scale; Cling’s eval-style programming support; projects related to Cling; and show interactive C++/CUDA...

Synchronization with Atomics in C++20

by Rainer Grimm

Sender/receiver workflows are quite common for threads. In such a workflow, the receiver is waiting for the sender's notification before it continues to work. There are various ways to implement these workflows. With C++11, you can use condition variables or promise/future pairs; with C++20, you can use atomics...