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C++ Foundation Developer Survey "Lite", 2018-08: C++ and Cloud

By Blog Staff | Aug 6, 2018 12:26 AM | Tags: None

cpp_logo.pngThank you to the over 3,000 people who participated six months ago in the Standard C++ Foundation's first-ever global C++ developer survey. Based on its success, we have decided to run these surveys about twice a year to learn about C++ usage generally across industries or in specific current domains.

This time, we focus on the domain of cloud-related software. As the name suggests, it's a one-pager:

C++ Developer Survey "Lite", 2018-08: C++ and Cloud

Please take 10 minutes or so to participate! A summary of the results, including aggregated highlights of common answers in the write-in responses, will be posted publicly here on isocpp.org and shared with the C++ standardization committee to help inform C++ evolution.

The survey will be open for one week.

Thank you for participating and helping to inform our committee and community.

CppCast Episode 161: Expectations and Exceptions with Simon Brand

By robwirving | Aug 3, 2018 08:01 PM | Tags: None

Episode 161 of CppCast the only podcast for C++ developers by C++ developers. In this episode Rob and Jason are joined by Simon Brand to discuss his upcoming CppCon talks covering exceptions, value wrappers, debuggers and more.

CppCast Episode 161: Expectations and Exceptions with Simon Brand

by Rob Irving and Jason Turner

About the interviewee:

Simon is a GPGPU toolchain developer at Codeplay Software in Edinburgh. He turns into a metaprogramming fiend every full moon, when he can be found bringing compilers to their knees with template errors and debating undefined behaviour on the C++ Slack channel. He co-organises the Edinburgh C++ user group and contributes to various programming standards bodies.

Outside of programming, he enjoys experimental films, homebrewing, and board games.

CppCon 2017: How to Write Effective Documentation for C++ Libraries...--Robert Ramey

By Adrien Hamelin | Aug 3, 2018 01:18 PM | Tags: community

Have you registered for CppCon 2018 in September? Registration is open now.

While we wait for this year’s event, we’re featuring videos of some of the 100+ talks from CppCon 2017 for you to enjoy. Here is today’s feature:

How to Write Effective Documentation for C++ Libraries...

by Robert Ramey

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

With the success of GitHub, everybody and his brother is a library developer. Programmers love to create code, upload it to GitHub and hope for immortality. Most projects get only the most cursory examination before being passed over by users. Why is that? GitHub considered the problem.

GitHub just published its 2017 Open Source Survey. The popular social coding service surveyed over 5,500 members of its community, from over 3,800 projects on github.com. It also spoke to 500 coders working on projects from outside the GitHub ecosystem. The Open Source Survey asked a broad array of questions. One that caught my eye was about problems people encounter when working with, or contributing to, open source projects. An incredible 93 percent of people reported being frustrated with “incomplete or confusing documentation”. see https://thenextweb.com/dd/2017/06/02/...

Even the most experienced and dedicated software developers can't do it. This can be confirmed by looking over recent reviews of Boost libraries. The most common complaint is that the documentation isn't useable.

Programmers love their stuff and hope to get people to use it, why don't they fix their documentation? The reason is simple: They don't know how.

Problems

a) It's tedious and boring to write
b) Developers don't know what to include and what to exclude
c) Tools make things harder
d) Regardless of the amount of effort invested, the end result is usually of little or no value.

This presentation will present a "Cookbook" and demonstration for creating documentation. Using this method will

a) Much diminish the tedium of the task.
b) Help improve to the quality of library design and implementation
c) Create something that is useful to the library user.

We will touch upon tools like Doxygen, etc. But this is only a small portion of the presentation. We use them so they deserve mention. But they don't cause the problem, and they don't solve it either.

CppCon 2017: How to Write a Custom Allocator--Bob Steagall

By Adrien Hamelin | Aug 1, 2018 12:54 PM | Tags: stl performance

Have you registered for CppCon 2018 in September? Registration is open now.

While we wait for this year’s event, we’re featuring videos of some of the 100+ talks from CppCon 2017 for you to enjoy. Here is today’s feature:

How to Write a Custom Allocator

by Bob Steagall

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

You'd like to improve the performance of your application with regard to memory management, and you believe this can be accomplished by writing a custom allocator. But where do you start? Modern C++ brings many improvements to the standard allocator model, but with those improvements come several issues that must be addressed when designing a new allocator.

This talk will provide guidance on how to write custom allocators for the C++14/C++17 standard containers. It will cover the requirements specified by the standard, and will describe the facilities provided by the standard to support the new allocator model and allocator-aware containers. We'll look at the issues of allocator identity and propagation, and examine their implications for standard library users, standard library implementers, and custom allocator implementers. We'll see how a container uses its allocator, including when and how a container's allocator instance propagates. This will give us the necessary background to describe allocators that implement unusual semantics, such as a stateful allocator type whose instances compare non-equal. Finally, the talk will provide some guidelines for how to specify a custom allocator's public interface based on the semantics it provides.

CppCon 2018 Program Available

By Adrien Hamelin | Aug 1, 2018 12:53 PM | Tags: community

Got take a look!

CppCon 2018 Program Available

From the article:

The program for CppCon 2018 is now live!

We’ll have over 100 regular sessions delivered by the best C++ presenters in the industry, many returning from previous years as well as some exciting new voices. We’ll have six or seven concurrent tracks full of sessions containing C++ best practices and what you need to know about C++17 and even what is planned for C++20...

CppCon 2017: CNL: A Compositional Numeric Library--John McFarlane

By Adrien Hamelin | Jul 30, 2018 11:11 AM | Tags: community

Have you registered for CppCon 2018 in September? Registration is open now.

While we wait for this year’s event, we’re featuring videos of some of the 100+ talks from CppCon 2017 for you to enjoy. Here is today’s feature:

CNL: A Compositional Numeric Library

by John McFarlane

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

CNL is a numerics library born out of efforts to standardize fixed-point arithmetic.
It provides number types which increase precision, enforce correctness and maintain efficiency.
And by designing these types with composability in mind, the library aims to do for integers what the STL does for pointers.

This introductory talk will show potential users how they can benefit from using CNL in a wide variety of applications. Firstly, the individual components will be illustrated using straightforward examples. Then we'll see how these components slot together to produce powerful new types. Finally I'll detail the steps necessary to adapt existing types to work within the CNL framework.

Along the way, I hope to share some of the insights I've gained while learning about literal types including: why you shouldn't mess with `int` if you want zero-cost abstractions; how C++ is getting better at supporting new number types and my hopes for the forthcoming Numeric TS.

CppCast Episode 160: Parallel Ranges with Christopher Di Bella

By robwirving | Jul 27, 2018 08:25 AM | Tags: None

Episode 160 of CppCast the first podcast for C++ developers by C++ developers. In this episode Rob and Jason are joined by Christopher Di Bella to discuss using Ranges with Parallel algorithms and much more.

CppCast Episode 160: Parallel Ranges with Christopher Di Bella

by Rob Irving and Jason Turner

About the interviewee:

Christopher Di Bella is a Staff Software Engineer for Codeplay’s ComputeCpp Runtime Technology and a C++ teacher. He advocates for including the Concepts TS and the Ranges TS in C++20.

Chris spends his days working on ComputeCpp, Codeplay’s implementation of SYCL, a Khronos Standard for heterogeneous programming in C++; the Khronos implementation for the Parallel STL (using SYCL); and researching Parallel Ranges, which is an attempt to fuse ranges together with the parallel STL.

Chris was previously a software developer for Nasdaq, and a tutor for UNSW Sydney’s advanced C++ and compiler courses. In his spare time, Chris enjoys poking at things involving Ranges, snowboarding, playing games, and watching films.

A Case for p0424 - Sane C++ Serialization -- Wojciech Szeszol

By ciechowoj | Jul 27, 2018 12:19 AM | Tags: None

Serialization was always a problematic topic in C++. Is it going to change in the future? Check out to see how the string literals as the template parameters can help here.

A Case for p0424 - Sane C++ Serialization

By Wojciech Szeszol

From the article:

Probably every C# developer knows how versatile the Newtonsoft.Json or the standard C# serialization libraries are. The serialization with DataContract or JsonProperty is easy to write, maintain and quite efficient. When we compare it with what C++ have to offer, the latter looks very poorly. We have selection of dedicated reflection/serialization libraries [...]. Unfortunately all of them come with different sets of drawbacks: they require the serialization methods to be written manually, force usage of ugly macros, require manual registration of the structures and their fields or involve additional compilation step for the schema definitions. [...] This may change with the new C++20 standard and the introduction of the string literals as the template parameters.