Fun with Lambdas: C++14 Style (Part 4)—Sumant Tambe

By Adrien Hamelin | Jul 2, 2015 12:57 PM | Tags: c++14 advanced

More rapid-fire “now write this using lambdas” problem-solution drill with Sumant Tambe:

Fun with Lambdas: C++14 Style (Part 4)

by Sumant Tambe

From the article:

C++14 has a number of features that support functional-style design. By "functional-style" I mean heavy use of higher-order functions (functions that take other functions as arguments). Quite often arguments to the higher-order functions are lambdas (closures, to be precise). With automatic return type deduction for normal functions, writing higher-order function becomes very easy and seamless in C++14...

Set-up and tear-down--Andrzej Krzemieński

By Adrien Hamelin | Jul 2, 2015 12:52 PM | Tags: performance intermediate

Today, you have an article about a specific aspect of unit-testing:

Set-up and tear-down

by Andrzej Krzemieński

From the article:

Recently as part of program run-time performance optimization effort, I was scanning through the code for occurrences of keyword new. The goal was to find unnecessary memory allocations. I was surprised to find most of news in the unit test module. Not that there was any particular need for memory allocation: it is just that the framework that was chosen (a fairly popular one) enforces on the programmers bad practices of manually controlling the life-time of their objects...

Trip Report: On Games(SG14) and TM(SG5) from The View at the May 2015 C++ Standard meeting in Lenexa

By Blog Staff | Jun 30, 2015 02:55 PM | Tags: None

Another longtime committee member just posted his trip report for last month's meeting:

On Games(SG14) and TM(SG5) from The View at the May 2015 C++ Standard meeting in Lenexa

by Michael Wong

From the article:

The yellow brick road starts here in Kansas (actually Lenexa) hosted by Perceptive Software, and it is called C++17. At this meeting, it led with a major evening discussion on the philosophy of C++17 on a Monday night full session...

Handling short codes — part II---Andrzej Krzemieński

By Adrien Hamelin | Jun 30, 2015 11:36 AM | Tags: performance intermediate

Second part of a discussion about designing a type storing character strings of length N (known at compile-time and sufficiently small).

Handling short codes - part II

by Andrzej Krzemieński

From the article:

Today, we will continue with the implementation of a type capable of storing short codes. For the previous post on the subject see here. This time, we will focus on type safety...

Bitesize Modern C++: enum class--Glennan Carnie

By Adrien Hamelin | Jun 29, 2015 12:19 AM | Tags: c++11 basics

A simple and complete explanation of the enum:

Bitesize Modern C++: enum class

by Glennan Carnie

From the article:

Enumerated types in C++ give a trivial simulation of symbolic types – that is, objects whose instances have unique, human-readable values. In C++ enumerations are essentially named integers that are either assigned values implicitly by the compiler or explicitly by the programmer (or a combination of both)...

The State of C++ – Is it Back or Not? -- Arne Mertz

By Jordi Mon Companys | Jun 28, 2015 08:35 AM | Tags: None

A personal opinion from Arne Mertz about the state of C++. Always interesting.

The State of C++ – Is it Back or Not?

By Arne Mertz

From the article:

The notion of C++ coming back to where it was before the raise of languages like Java and C#, or even the comparison of C++ now and then has a serious flaw: It is an isolated view of only the languages, competing for popularity in a fixed surrounding.

The Four Polymorphisms in C++ -- Peteris Krumins

By Niks | Jun 24, 2015 04:39 AM | Tags: basics

C++ has more than one ways to express polymorphism. Discover the nomenclature and read examples on all of them in the following article :

The Four Polymorphisms in C++

by Peteris Krumins

From the article:

(...) These polymorphisms also go by different names in C++ :

• Subtype polymorphism is also known as runtime polymorphism.
• Parametric polymorphism is also known as compile-time polymorphism.
• Ad-hoc polymorphism is also known as overloading.
• Coercion is also known as (implicit or explicit) casting.

Safety: off - How not to shoot yourself in the foot with C++ atomics -- Anthony Williams

By Mantosh Kumar | Jun 17, 2015 10:20 PM | Tags: c++11 advanced

Guidelines for how to use C++ atomics safely in our code using worked examples.

Slides and code and for my ACCU 2015 presentation

by Anthony Williams

From the article:

It's now two months since the ACCU 2015 conference in Bristol, UK, so I thought it was about time I posted my slides.

This year my presentation was titled "Safety: off - How not to shoot yourself in the foot with C++ atomics". I gave a brief introduction to the C++ atomics facilities, some worked examples of usage, and guidelines for how to use atomics safely in your code.

The slides are available here, and the code examples here.

Time To Get Moving! -- Tony DaSilva

By Blog Staff | Jun 16, 2015 12:25 PM | Tags: None

A nice "in a nutshell" about why you should run, not walk, to take advantage of move semantics:

Time To Get Moving!

by Tony DaSilva

From the article:

Starting from C++11 on, we not only get those operations for free for our user-defined types, we also get these turbo-boosters:

• a “free” move constructor
• a “free” move assignment operator

In addition, all of the C++ standard library containers have been “move enabled“.

When I first learned how move semantics worked and why this new core language feature dramatically improved program performance over copying, I started wondering about user-defined types that wrapped move-enabled, standard library types. For example,  check out this simple user-defined Msg structure that encapsulates a move-enabled std::vector...

C++ and Facebook Moments: Facebook code blog, Techworld

By Blog Staff | Jun 16, 2015 07:01 AM | Tags: None

Here are two notable articles related to C++'s central role in Facebook's Moments app, released yesterday.

The first is the announcement on the Facebook code blog:

Under the Hood: Building Moments

by Ashwin Bharambe, Zack Gomez, and Will Ruben

From the article:

... There are many alternatives for sharing code between mobile platforms. We wanted to optimize for fast iteration, app performance, and native look and feel. After weighing the alternatives, we chose to write the UI in platform-specific code and the business logic in shared code using C++. Traditionally, C++ is known for providing high performance while lacking easy memory management and higher-level abstractions. However, using modern C++11 features such as std::shared_ptr reference counting, lambda functions, and auto variable declarations, we were able to quickly implement highly performant, memory-safe code...

The growing use of C++ for cross-platform shared code in mobile apps is not a new technical story in itself -- last year's CppCon had multiple sessions about doing this including from Dropbox and Microsoft Office -- but even the mainstream press is starting to notice this is happening more often:

C++: It is back to the future for Facebook's new photo-sharing app

by Joab Jackson, TechWorld

From the article:

Faced with the burgeoning problem of maintaining a code base for multiple, incompatible mobile applications, Facebook engineers turned their noses up at HTML5 and trendy development programmes and went back to the 70s [sic] for an answer.

By choosing the C++ programming language for its new Moments photo-sharing application, Facebook is able to maintain a single code base for much of the app, which runs on both iOS and Android devices.

"It is somewhat of a surprising choice," admitted Ashwin Bharambe, one of the Facebook developers who created Moments, about the use of C++. "There are more and more people trying to do this in order to share code across different platforms." ...