A Critical Look at the Coding Standards Landscape

by Michael Price

The C and C++ programming languages are rife with spiky pits, hairpin curves, and loaded footguns, leading industries working with critical systems to embrace strict standards that aim to reduce the amount of damage that can be done with the awesome powers available to them when using these languages.

This session will briefly review what sorts of standards exist in the public today, leading into a serious critique of the more foolish and user-unfriendly aspects of these standards, and finally closing with an optimistic view of “the good parts” of the same.

More about Variadic Templates ...

by Rainer Grimm

There is a lot of power in the strange-looking three dots that are heavily used in the Standard Template Library. Today, I visualize the expansion of the three dots and show a few use cases...

Stricter Expression Evaluation Order in C++17

by Bartlomiej Filipek

C++ has many dark corners and many caveats that can cause you to scratch your head in confusion. One of the issues we had until C++17 was the evaluation order of expressions. In this blog post, I’ll show you the new rules that we got in C++17 that made this complicated term much simpler and practical.

Here are the main points for today:

• What’s the case with make_unique vs unique_ptr<T>(new T) in a function call.
• What are the new rules for C++17?
• Are all bugs fixed and now well defined?

Let’s go.

Bringing back the Meeting C++ employer listing

by Jens Weller

Meeting C++ brings back the listing of C++ employers to its website as part of Meeting C++ recruiting. The companies will be visible in the listing it self, but also have their logos displayed in the job section next to every job advert posted to Meeting C++! Additionally, the companies are also listed in the CV/resume sharing form of Meeting C++.

PVS-Studio 7.14: intermodular analysis in C++ and plugin for JetBrains CLion

by Andrey Karpov

As the list below shows, most of the diagnostics that we currently implement are based on the MISRA C standard. We focused on the MISRA C support, and now PVS-Studio covers 60% of the standard. Soon, we plan to cover at least 80%. We also want to introduce the support of coding standards from the MISRA C Compliance.

Dealing with Embedded Limitations

Panel Discussion hosted by Ben Saks

Many embedded systems have requirements on latency, memory usage, and resource consumption. This is especially true of safety-critical and security-related systems. Many programmers and organizations worry that using C++ features will prevent them from meeting these requirements. Some avoid using specific features such as exception handling, while others avoid using C++ entirely.

This panel will discuss the challenges and benefits of using C++ in embedded contexts. We will explore ways that embedded systems can leverage the power of Modern C++ features to meet their guarantees. We will discuss which concerns are based in fact and which concerns are based on misconceptions.
Feel free to bring your own questions about anything that you believe inhibits your use of modern C++ on an embedded system. We will discuss pre-selected questions as well as audience submissions.

Boost Version 1.77.0 released

New Libraries
A C++14 reflection library, from Peter Dimov. Provides macros for describing enumerators and struct/class members, and primitives for querying this information.
Lambda2:
A C++14, dependency-free, single header lambda library, from Peter Dimov. Allows simple function objects to be constructed via expressions such as _1 + 5, _1 % 2 == 0, _1 > _2, or _1 == ' ' || _1 == '\t'...

Some Programming Myths Revisited

by Patrice Roy

We have been taught, or we ourselves have taught, things that we took for granted as being "good practice" in programming. Such things often stem from the "wisdom of the ancients" (although computer science being young as sciences come, some of the "ancients" are still among us and thriving today, and we're so lucky to have them!), and are in effect part of our "myths".

However, being as grounded in the science-that-there-was as these recommendations are, our ideas have evolved, so have our programming languages, and it can be interesting to revisit some of these taken-for-granted ideas.

In C++, particularly in what some call "modern C++", we find a language that is different enough from its forebears to make revisiting our "myths" interesting. How do such things as "goto considered harmful" or "only one return per function", for example, hold as "wisdom" with respect to modern C++? Do they still help us write better programs or should be rethink them under the light of modern languages and practice?

The aim of this talk is to examine what some commonly heard recommendations or advices with respect to programming practice mean in the context of "modern" C++. We will take a small set of such advices, present them in context, show how well (or how badly) they suit today's C++, and try to rephrase them if this seems advantageous.

Moving a project to C++ named Modules

by Cameron DaCamara

There is a lot of hype (and perhaps restraint) to using modules in projects. The general blocker tends to be build support, but even with good build support there is a distinct lack of useful resources for practices around moving projects to using named modules (not just header units). In this blog we will take a small project I created, analyze its components, draft up a plan for modularizing it, and execute that plan...

Variadic Templates or the Power of Three Dots

by Rainer Grimm

A variadic template is a template that can have an arbitrary number of template parameters. This feature may seem magical to you if you see it the first time. So, let me demystify variadic templates...