Vector Hosted Lists--Thomas Young

By Adrien Hamelin | Mar 2, 2015 12:01 AM | Tags: performance intermediate

Want perfomance and speed? Vectors are the solution:

Vector Hosted Lists

by Thomas Young

From the article:

Vectors are great when adding or removing elements at the end of a sequence, but not so hot when deleting elements at arbitrary positions.

If that's a requirement, you might find yourself reaching for a pointer-based list.

Not so fast!

Memory locality is important, contiguous buffers are a really good thing, and a standard vector will often out-perform pointer-based lists even where you perform non-contiguous, list-style modifications such as arbitrary element deletion.

And we can 'host' a list within a vector to get the advantages of a contiguous buffer at the same time as 0(1) complexity for these kinds of manipulations...

Comparison of C++ Format and C library's printf -- Victor Zverovich

By Blog Staff | Feb 27, 2015 12:08 PM | Tags: None

The C printf family is still the gold standard of performance for formatted I/O, but woefully fragile and inextensible. C++'s iostreams offers important advantages in type safety, but struggles with performance and internationalization.

A number of projects, such as Boost.Format, try to the advantages of both. Here's further discussion about one such library we linked to recently:

Comparison of C++ Format and C library's printf

by Victor Zverovich

From the article:

I was recently asked on GitHub why would someone use fmt::printf, which is a part of the C++ Format library, over the standard C library printf. This is a fair question and so I decided to write this blog post comparing the two.

Disclaimer: I’m the author of C++ Format, so this is all very biased =).

Operator Overloading – Introduction to Boost.Operators -- Arne Metz

By Felix Petriconi | Feb 27, 2015 12:45 AM | Tags: boost basics

Arne Mertz goes into the details of using boost operators.

Operator Overloading – Introduction to Boost.Operators, Part 1

Operator Overloading – Introduction to Boost.Operators, Part 2

by Arne Mertz

From the articles:

In my first two posts about operator overloading I have written about the basics and common practice. This post shows some lessons from the common practice post on a concrete example and then introduces to Boost.Operators, a library that conveniently reduces the boilerplate involved when overloading multiple operators for a class.

Operators Travel in Packs

If we look at the list of operators, we see that there are about 50 of them, and many of them can be overloaded in different ways. Even if we restrict ourselves to a few operations that make sense for a given class, then one of those operations often brings two or more operators.

 

SFINAE std::result_of? Yeah, right!--Scott Prager

By Adrien Hamelin | Feb 26, 2015 02:10 PM | Tags: c++11 advanced

On the matter of having a useful error message:

SFINAE std::result_of? Yeah, right!

by Scott Prager

From the article:

Return type deduction pre-decltype and auto could really make one mad. Back then, if you wanted a function object, you had to make it "adaptable", meaning it had to inherit from std::unary_ or binary_function and define its first_argument_type, second_argument_type, and result_type. There had been no concept of "transparent functors" allowing us to pass polymorphic functions to higher order functions (like std::plus<> to std::accumulate). For an example of programming in these dark ages, check out the FC++ FAQ.

Type Deduction and Braced Initializers--Arne Mertz

By Adrien Hamelin | Feb 23, 2015 02:39 PM | Tags: c++11 basics

If you are confused about the topic, read this article:

Type Deduction and Braced Initializers

by Arne Mertz

From the article:

I just finished watching a talk from CppCon 2014 by Scott Meyers: Type Deduction and Why You Care. All in all it was a very interesting and entertaining talk, and I learned a thing or two, especially about the combination of type deduction and braced initializers. Since this blog is about simplifying the use of C++, I want to have a short look at that special combination and derive a rule of thumb from it...

Non Static Data Members Initialization--Bartlomiej Filipek

By Adrien Hamelin | Feb 23, 2015 02:32 PM | Tags: c++11 basics

Here is a useful thing to know that appeared with C++11:

Non Static Data Members Initialization

by Bartlomiej Filipek

From the article:

My short summary for non static data members initialization from modern C++. A very useful feature. Should we use it or not?

John Lakos interviews Alexander Stepanov and Daniel Rose on their new Book

By Mantosh Kumar | Feb 21, 2015 10:38 PM | Tags: None

Published on InformIT in which John Lakos interviews Alexander Stepanov and Daniel Rose about various aspects of generic programming and modern C++.

From Mathematics to Generic Programming: An Interview with Alexander Stepanov and Daniel Rose

 

John Lakos interviews Alexander Stepanov and Daniel Rose, authors of From Mathematics to Generic Programming, on their new book, why it applies to everyday programmers, and their positions on some closely related technical issues — including value semantics, concepts, contracts, and polymorphic memory resources — facing the C++ Standards Committee today.

Fighting off memory leaks and errors (C++11) -- Kacper Kołodziej

By Mantosh Kumar | Feb 21, 2015 09:09 PM | Tags: None

This article talks about how modern C++ idioms could be used to avoid memory leak and errors.

Fighting off memory leaks and errors (C++11)

by Kacper Kolodziej

From the article:

Modern tools provided with C++11's standard library make fight with memory leaks and errors easier and more effective. Sometimes problems which are seemingly not dangerous might put an end to your application. We are going to learn how to find and avoid them.

Counting bits -- Jens Weller

By Mantosh Kumar | Feb 21, 2015 07:56 PM | Tags: None

How to generate random bytes and how generic programming allow/support reuse code for different types.

   Counting bits

   by Jens Weller

From the article:

I did a bit of fun coding. I'm currently thinking on how to generate random bytes, for example the 16 random bytes for the initialization vector of AES. The mersenne twister RNG is known to give very good randomness, so it would be a possible an easy source. An std::array<uint32_t,4> would be a good container, filled with generate. But first, I wanted to know, how random is the mersenne twister really? So, when counting the bits in the result of a few thousand calls to a rng, the distribution should be even. So, today I wrote code that counts bits, and tested it on the mersenne twister.

Common Algorithm Patterns -- Scott Prager

By Jeremy Wright | Feb 19, 2015 07:44 AM | Tags: range intermediate efficiency algorithm

An interesting article concerning ranges, and how to make the ever useful algorithm header even more effective:

Common algorithm patterns

by Scott Prager

From the article:

Of the STL, <algorithm> may be the most well-used non-container library, but often requires a level of verbosity that requires just as much typing as the hand-written loop, making it not always feel so convenient. It benefits code that uses it with increased clarity and mathematical soundness, so reducing the syntactic overhead should be a goal of those using it. Today I will talk about these problems and demonstrate ways of making it more terse and sound.