CppCon 2024 Irksome C++ -- Walter E Brown

By Blog Staff | Aug 4, 2024 03:33 PM | Tags: None

Registration is now open for CppCon 2024! The conference starts on September 15 and will be held in person in Aurora, CO. To whet your appetite for this year’s conference, we’re posting some upcoming talks that you will be able to attend this year. Here’s another CppCon future talk we hope you will enjoy – and register today for CppCon 2024!

Irksome C++

Thursday, September 19 • 16:45 - 17:45 MDT

Walter E Brown

Summary of the talk:

As much as I like C++, it is certainly not free of -- let's say -- quirks.  Both the core language and the standard library exhibit idiosyncracies, sometimes even in conflict with one another.

Some of these "oops" may be historical in origin.  However, most are due to the spectrum of viewpoints held by the hundreds of contributors who have participated in C++ standardization to date.

This talk points out many of these inconsistencies and numerous other infelicities in naming, behavior, or both.  Come see whether *your* pet C++ peeve is mentioned!

 

With broad experience in industry, academia, consulting, and research, Dr. Walter E. Brown has been a computer programmer for almost 60 years, and a C++ programmer for more than 40 years.He joined the C++ standards effort in 2000, and has since written circa 175 proposal papers. Among numerous other contributions, he is responsible for introducing such now-standard C++ library features as cbegin/cend, common_type, gcd/lcm, void_t, and ’s mathematical special functions, as well as the headers and . He has also significantly impacted such C++ core language features as alias templates, contextual conversions, variable templates, static_assert, and operator (the C++20 “spaceship operator”).When not playing with his grandchildren, Dr. Brown continues as an Emeritus participant in the C++ standards process and as a frequent speaker at C++ conferences and meetups worldwide.

CppCon 2024 Building Cppcheck - What We Learned from 17 Years of Development -- Daniel Marjamäki

By Blog Staff | Aug 3, 2024 03:29 PM | Tags: None

Registration is now open for CppCon 2024! The conference starts on September 15 and will be held in person in Aurora, CO. To whet your appetite for this year’s conference, we’re posting some upcoming talks that you will be able to attend this year. Here’s another CppCon future talk we hope you will enjoy – and register today for CppCon 2024!

Building Cppcheck - What We Learned from 17 Years of Development

Wednesday, September 18 • 09:00 - 10:00 MDT

by Daniel Marjamäki

Summary of the talk:

Cppcheck has been evolving for 17 years, guided by a clear philosophy: minimal false positives and ease of use. This presentation will share the insights we've gained during its development. Our approach to easy configuration is a double-edged sword, providing user-friendly setup while occasionally leading to lower recall. We maintain a strict definition of false positives, ensuring the tool does not warn about well-written, functional code. This principle, while challenging, drives us to fix rather than suppress false positives. A core philosophy of Cppcheck is to learn from mistakes. When an issue is identified, we strive to implement checkers to prevent similar mistakes in the future.

The open-source community plays a crucial role in Cppcheck's evolution. We collaborate to enhance the tool, scanning large codebases like Debian's source code to identify inconsistent or dangerous code and measure false positives. We also explore how abstractions, compiler annotations, and contracts can improve SCA tools' precision and performance. This talk will provide a comprehensive look at the lessons learned and the continuous improvement of Cppcheck.

Daniel Marjamäki is a software engineer from Sweden and the author of Cppcheck, a static analysis tool for C/C++ code. He created Cppcheck to help developers find bugs and improve code quality. Thanks to his work, Cppcheck has become a widely used tool in the programming community. Marjamäki is known for his contributions to improving software development practices.

CppCon 2024 Data Is All You Need for Fusion -- Manya Bansal

By Blog Staff | Aug 2, 2024 03:24 PM | Tags: None

Registration is now open for CppCon 2024! The conference starts on September 15 and will be held in person in Aurora, CO. To whet your appetite for this year’s conference, we’re posting some upcoming talks that you will be able to attend this year. Here’s another CppCon future talk we hope you will enjoy – and register today for CppCon 2024!

Data Is All You Need for Fusion

Monday, September 16 • 16:45 - 17:45 MDT

by Manya Bansal

Summary of the talk:

Functions are the fundamental unit of interoperability in software design: users write applications by composing functions provided by various libraries. However, naive function composition can result in poor performance due to memory overheads that exist at function boundaries. Operator fusion --- combining the execution of several operators into one operator --- is a well-known technique to combat this overhead. Previous solutions to add fusion rely on complex, monolithic compilers and languages that force performance engineers to rediscover old solutions in new ecosystems, leading to decades of performance engineering work going underutilized. In this work, I attempt to identify the minimal ingredients required to enable fusion on top of existing library interfaces. In doing so, I propose a lightweight enrichment of function interfaces that exposes data production and consumption patterns of functions. I show how to implement these ideas in C++ and demonstrate the benefits of my system by showing that it is competitive with state-of-the-art high-performance libraries, and that it can fuse across library boundaries for unforeseen workloads.
 

Manya is a computer science PhD student at MIT, advised by Saman Amarasinghe and Jonathan Ragan-Kelley. Before starting her PhD, she studied Mathematics at Stanford University, and worked with Fredrik Kjolstad and Dawson Engler. Manya is interested in designing extensible and productive languages and tools for heterogeneous systems.

Trip Report: C++ On Sea 2024 -- Sandor Dargo

By Blog Staff | Aug 1, 2024 04:29 PM | Tags: None

I had the privilege to attend and present at C++ on Sea 2024 for the 5th time in a row!

Trip Report: C++ On Sea 2024

by Sandor Dargo

From the article:

The conference had a very strong start. Right after the keynote by Dave Abrahams, 4 incredible speakers were on stage at the same time on the 4 different tracks. Jason Turner, Walter E Brown, Nico Josuttis, Mateusz Pusz…

 

If a conference could have these people throughout the whole program, it would already be a strong conference. C++ On Sea proposed such a strong line-up that these people could be scheduled at the same time. It didn’t make my decision easier, so I chose based on the topic, and I wanted to grow my knowledge on constexpr so I stayed in the main() room.

CppCon 2024 Multi Producer, Multi Consumer, Lock Free Atomic Queue -- Erez Strauss

By Blog Staff | Aug 1, 2024 03:19 PM | Tags: None

Registration is now open for CppCon 2024! The conference starts on September 15 and will be held in person in Aurora, CO. To whet your appetite for this year’s conference, we’re posting some upcoming talks that you will be able to attend this year. Here’s another CppCon future talk we hope you will enjoy – and register today for CppCon 2024!

Multi Producer, Multi Consumer, Lock Free Atomic Queue

Tuesday, September 17 • 0900 - 10:00 MDT

by Erez Strauss

Summary of the talk:

This presentation introduces a multi-producer, multi-consumer, lock-free queue with unique characteristics. We will cover the C++17 implementation and the std::atomic features required for this queue based on the CPU atomic instructions and discuss the queue's portability across various CPU architectures, beyond just X86_64 and runtime environments.

Efficient message queue-based communication between threads is crucial for optimal performance in multi-threaded applications. Queues are fundamental data structures that interact with various aspects of the application environment, including schedulers, memory allocation systems, and CPU hardware architectures.

Many use cases such as trading platforms, games, audio processing and other fields have strict latency and scaling requirements and this queue implementation has proved to reduce system latencies.

The presentation will feature the design of the queue, the required template language features, bandwidth and latency consideration, and multiple demo applications. Comparing this queue implementation’s benchmark results with other existing queues will follow. Finally, we will discuss potential future work and areas for improvement.

Join us to explore how this innovative queue implementation can improve your multi-threaded application performance.

All presentation materials, including the C++17 source code, slides, benchmarks, and demo applications are available on GitHub.

Erez Strauss worked in Banks and Hedge Funds while focused on low latency systems.