Home » Blog » Categories » Articles & Books

Articles & Books

7 Top Tips for Debugging C++--Greg Law

By Adrien Hamelin | Jun 9, 2021 12:12 PM | Tags: None

How do you do it?

7 Top Tips for Debugging C++

by Greg Law

From the article:

Brian Kernighan famously said, “Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you’re as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?”. For me, this doesn’t just mean “keep it simple.” It also means debugging is central to programming – you cannot be a great programmer without being great at debugging. Hopefully, my favorite C++ debugging tips will help you be as clever and productive debugging your code as you are writing it in the first place...

Decent concepts--Andrzej KrzemieĊ„ski

By Adrien Hamelin | Jun 9, 2021 12:06 PM | Tags: c++20

Are you using concepts?

Decent concepts

by Andrzej Krzemieński

From the article:

Last year I published two posts on writing concepts:

  1. Concept Archetypes,
  2. Semantic requirements in concepts.

Having had some time to reflect upon these posts, I now realize that the model presented in them is not complete. In this post I want to give a more coherent view of concepts...

A list of bad practices commonly seen in industrial projects-- Thomas Lourseyre

By Adrien Hamelin | Jun 9, 2021 11:59 AM | Tags: community

Are you in such an environement?

A list of bad practices commonly seen in industrial projects

by Thomas Lourseyre

From the article:

If you ever worked in a company-size software project (with numerous developers), there is a good chance that the codebase was, at least, pretty messy.

In these days, most industrial C++ developers are not experts. You will often work with developers with a Java or Python background, people who just learnt C++ at school and don’t really care that much about the language and old developers who code in “C with classes” instead of C++.

Having worked on a few industrial projects myself, I realized there are some recurring patterns and bad practices. If you happen to teach your coworkers to avoid these bad practices, you will all take a huge step toward a beautiful codebase and it will be beneficial to you, your coworkers and your project.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of these common bad practices...

Quick Q: Overload resolution between object, rvalue reference, const reference

By Adrien Hamelin | Jun 7, 2021 12:14 PM | Tags: intermediate

Quick A: the better match is picked, and an error generated if there none.

Recently on SO:

Overload resolution between object, rvalue reference, const reference

As there is only one parameter, the rule is that one of the three viable parameter initializations of that parameter must be a better match than both the other two. When two initializations are compared, either one is better than the other, or neither is better (they are indistinguishable).

Without special rules about direct reference binding, all three initializations mentioned would be indistinguishable (in all three comparisons)...

GotW #102 Solution: Assertions and "UB" -- Herb Sutter

By Blog Staff | Jun 3, 2021 10:55 AM | Tags: None

Solution just posted:

GotW #102 Solution: Assertions and "UB"

by Herb Sutter

From the article:

Now that we have considered assertions, postconditions, and preconditions in GotWs #97-101, let’s pause and reflect: To what extent does a failed contract imply "UB"... either the Hidden Dragon of Undefined Behavior, or the Crouching Tiger of Unspecified Behavior?

How to Insert Several Elements in a Vector (With No Memory Errors)--Jonathan Boccara

By Adrien Hamelin | May 31, 2021 02:36 PM | Tags: intermediate

How do you do it?

How to Insert Several Elements in a Vector (With No Memory Errors)

by Jonathan Boccara

From the article:

Inserting elements in a vector sounds like the most basic use case we can think of when it comes to using collections in C++.

Nevertheless, this is a complex topic in itself, because std::vector offers various ways to insert several elements. Choosing the most appropriate depending on your exact use case allows to write more expressive code. And misusing the interface of std::vector can lead to memory errors.

Let’s navigate the various ways to insert several elements in a vector in a safe way, so that you can choose the one that fits best for your code...

Compile-time pre-calculations in C++--Mohammad Nasirifar

By Adrien Hamelin | May 31, 2021 02:30 PM | Tags: performance

The evolution.

Compile-time pre-calculations in C++

by Mohammad Nasirifar

From the article:

With C++17’s constexpr functions and C++20’s consteval specifier, it is easy to do io-independent pre-calculations of algorithms while compiling the program. This may not be useful or even possible in long running programs and is unlikely to make a difference in their performance, but in binaries that do short calculations with a set of parameters fixed at compile-time, a Sieve of Eratosthenes array, or roots of unity used for calculating DFT loaded right from the binary could make a difference...

East End Functions--Phil Nash

By Adrien Hamelin | May 31, 2021 02:23 PM | Tags: community

Did you know about those reasons?

East End Functions

by Phil Nash

From the article:

There has been a recent stirring of attention, in the C++ community, for the practice of always placing the const modifier to the right of the thing it modifies. The practice has even been gifted a catchy name: East Const (which, I think, is what has stirred up the interest)...