C++ Annotated: Dec – Feb edition

by Anastasia Kazakova

In this edition:

• Conferences
• News & Stories
• Releases

Guidelines Support Library Review: span<T>

by Marius Bancila

The Guidelines Support Library is a Microsoft implementation of some of the types and functions described in the C++ Core Guidelines maintained by the Standard C++ Foundation. Among the types provided by the GSL is span<T> formerly known as array_view<T>. This article is an introduction to this type.

Returning multiple values from functions in C++

by Eli Bendersky

Since C++ has no built-in syntax for returning multiple values from functions and methods, programmers have been using a number of techniques to simulate this when needed, and the number has grown since the introduction of C++11. In this post I want to provide an overview of some of the options we have today for returning multiple values from functions, and possible future directions in the language...

C++17 and its Technical Specifications

by Jens Weller

Part 2 of my series about the current proposals for C++17. This part is covering the Technical Specifications (TS), which are currently released. Some of them will make it into C++17. Those not making it into C++17...

C++ User Group meetings in March 2016

by Jens Weller

A new month, and more C++ User Groups are meeting! There are more details about running your own user group at the C++ User Group page of Meeting C++. My list of User Groups contains now 65 groups, which of the most have been active in the last year, some do not meet every month but most do. This month it is again 25 User Groups which have announced their meetings sofar!

During February I found 3 new C++ User Groups: Sofia, Hannover, Nantes.

The meetings...

Core C++ - lvalues and rvalues

by Anthony Williams

One of the most misunderstood aspect of C++ is the use of the terms lvalue and rvalue, and what they mean for how code is interpreted. Though lvalue and rvalue are inherited from C, with C++11, this taxonomy was extended and clarified, and 3 more terms were added: glvalue, xvalue and prvalue. In this article I'm going to examine these terms, and explain what they mean in practice.

Another polymorphism

by Andrzej Krzemieński

In this post we will try to see by a practical example what Boost.Variant is for. You can sometimes see examples that use type variant<int, double, string>, but to me they are artificial: I never needed to use something that is either a double or int; but I still consider this library useful. Even if you are already familiar with Boost.Variant an its concepts of “never-empty guarantee” and “static visitor”, I made sure there is still something you can get from reading this post.

Selecting by interface, an idea almost to good to be true

by Jens Weller

Last night, I've been coding until 3 am. Working on an API which will connect my CMS to JSON libraries in a generic way. For this I did study different JSON Libraries in the past weeks. I almost wrote another one Yet, I had the idea to write a generic interface to interface with some of these libraries, so that my own code is not hard wired to a certain API...

Current Proposals for C++17

by Jens Weller

There is a new batch of proposals for C++17, published for next weeks ISO C++ Committee meeting in Jacksonville, Florida. With way over 100 proposals...

Automatic event cleanup in C++

by Nercury

Event subscriptions have a downside: someone has to unsubscribe. Usual approach is to make sure it happens when the subscibtion is no longer needed.

But, can we do it automatically, in a way that is easy to use and extend?

Let's see how it can be done in C++...