CppCon 2019: A Unifying Abstraction for Async in C++--Eric Niebler, David Hollman

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!

A Unifying Abstraction for Async in C++

by Eric Niebler, David Hollman

Summary of the talk:

Async in C++ is in a sad state. The standard tools -- promises, futures, threads, locks, and std::async -- are either inefficient, broken, or both. Even worse, there is no standard way to say _where_ work should happen. Parallel algorithms, heterogeneous computing, networking & IO, reactive streams, and more: all critically important foundational technologies that await a standard abstraction for asynchronous computation.

In this talk, Eric Niebler and David Hollman dig into the Standard Committee's search for the basis operations that underpin all asynchronous computation: the long-sought Executor concept. The latest iteration of Executors is based on the Sender/Receiver programming model, which provides a generalization of many existing paradigms in asynchronous programming, including future/promise, message passing, continuation passing, channels, and the observer pattern from reactive programming. It also has surprising and deep connections to coroutines, which further demonstrates the model’s potential to be a truly unifying abstraction for asynchronous programming in C++20 and beyond.

Eric and David will present the short-term and long-term directions for Executors in ISO Standard C++, illustrating the design by walking through several implementation examples. They will talk about the direct connection between coroutines and the Sender/Receiver model and discuss what it means for the future of asynchronous APIs in C++. Finally, they will cover how the restrictions imposed by the Executors model should affect the way you write code today so your code is ready for the next big revolution in parallel and concurrent C++ programming.

C++ Lambda Story is 100% Complete

Will you read it?

C++ Lambda Story is 100% Complete

by Bartlomiej Filipek

From the article:

I’m pleased to announce that I’ve finished the work on the latest update for C++ Lambda Story! This makes the book complete now, and I can finally set its status to 100%! Read on to see the latest changes. It got more than 50 new pages!

CppCon Academy 2020

Are you interested?

CppCon Academy 2020

From the article:

CppCon Academy, the classes that we host before and after the main conference days, has successfully recruited from among the top C++ instructors in the world...

CppCon 2019: Everyday Efficiency: In-Place Construction (Back to Basics?)--Ben Deane

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!

Everyday Efficiency: In-Place Construction (Back to Basics?)

by Ben Deane

Summary of the talk:

Efficient C++ has always been about minimizing copies. This practically-focused
talk is about how to do that when working with move semantics, perfect
forwarding and STL containers, or non-STL containers that present similar
interfaces.

In-place construction is an easily stated goal, but can be really fiddly to get
right, especially given the foibles of various container interfaces. We'll talk
about copy elision; when to use emplace, insert, or other methods; vectors,
maps, optionals, variants; and how things change from C++11 through C++20.
Attendees will learn why in-place construction is beneficial and exactly how to
achieve optimal efficiency with the various standard container types.

CppCon 2019: 10 Techniques to Understand Existing Code--Jonathan Boccara

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!

10 Techniques to Understand Existing Code

by Jonathan Boccara

Summary of the talk:

One of the reasons why a lot of us work in C++ is because there is a huge amount of existing projects written in C++.

But existing code can be hard to understand.

In this presentation, you will learn how to make sense of code quickly, from the general big picture of the codebase all the way down to the little details of the code of a complex class.

The ten rules covered in this session will teach you to:
- start reading code from the end
- identify the parts of code that carry the most information
- locate the code of any feature visible in the application
- and many more!

Code reading techniques usually come with years and years of experience. This presentation will teach some of them to you right now, supported by code examples.

There is a wealth of talks about how to write C++ code using the latest features of the language, but there are very few talks about reading existing code. In particular the everyday code that people have in their codebases. And as the saying goes, code is read much more often than it is written.

This presentation aims at filling this need in a practical way, by exposing 10 techniques that conferences attendees can use on an everyday basis to understand quickly the code they get to work on, as soon as they go back to the office after the conference.