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LLDB is Coming to Windows--Zachary Turner

By Adrien Hamelin | Jan 21, 2015 01:07 AM | Tags: intermediate

A new article on the LLVM blog speaks about LLDB coming on Windows soon:

LLDB is Coming to Windows

by Zachary Turner

From the article:

We've spoken in the past about teaching Clang to fully support Windows and be compatible with MSVC.  Until now, a big missing piece in this story has been debugging the clang-generated executables.  Over the past 6 months, we've started working on making LLDB work well on Windows and support debugging both regular Windows programs and those produced by Clang...

Don’t Try Too Hard! – Exception Handling -- Arne Mertz

By Felix Petriconi | Jan 20, 2015 08:11 AM | Tags: intermediate basics

Arne Mertz describes in his recent article insights about exception handling.

Don’t Try Too Hard! – Exception Handling

by Arne Mertz

From the article:

Among C++ developers there often appears to be a misconception about what it means to deal with code that can throw exceptions. The misconception is that the possibility of exceptions means one has to try and catch often and almost everywhere. I will try to explain why I think that is wrong and where I think try/catch is appropriate and where not.

Providing Explicit Specializations for Non-Template Members of Class Template -- Pavel Frolov

By psfrolov | Jan 19, 2015 10:10 AM | Tags: advanced

One of the lesser-known features of C++ templates.

Providing Explicit Specializations for Non-Template Members of Class Template

by Pavel Frolov

From the article:

C++ is full of surprises (albeit not always good ones grin. It is a well known fact that you can provide explicit specializations for function templates and class templates. But it was a total surprise to me, that you can provide explicit specializations for non-template members of class template without specializing the class template itself!

Type safe handles in C++--Emil Ernerfeldt

By Adrien Hamelin | Jan 16, 2015 03:46 PM | Tags: intermediate

Some time ago, Emil Ernerfeldt wrote about type safe handles. Simple and interesting.

Type safe handles in C++

by Emil Ernerfeldt

From the article:

Let's say you have a system of resources and you identify them using integers as handles. These integers are meaningless to the user, but internally they may be indices into an array, or just a running count...

Why does a single integer assignment statement consume all of my CPU? -- Raymond Chen

By Blog Staff | Jan 16, 2015 02:08 PM | Tags: None

A fresh here's-the-code-spot-the-performance-problem analysis.

Why does a single integer assignment statement consume all of my CPU?

by Raymond Chen

From the article:

Profiling showed that over 80% of the time spent by Calculate­The­Value was inside the Set­Int32 method call, in particular on the line

  *reinterpret_cast<int32_t *>(m_data) = value;

Why does it take so much time to store an integer to memory, dwarfing the actual computation to calculate that integer?

Spoiler hint: [Chaotic neutral]

Operator Overloading -- Arne Mertz

By Felix Petriconi | Jan 16, 2015 01:55 AM | Tags: basics

Arne Mertz describes in a series of articles the principles of operator overloading.

Operator Overloading

Operator Overloading: Common Practice

by Arne Mertz

From the articles:

Operators can be used to make user defined classes act like known types, e.g. like numbers, pointers and iterators. That way they facilitate the usage of those classes. They can also be used to make your objects do whatever you want them to do, for example build structures that save the operations for later evaluation. The latter is especially useful for building embedded DSLs and gives enough subject matter for a whole series of blog posts. [The first] post will cover the former use of operator overloading, i.e. writing operators that behave like “normal” operators.

... In [the second] post I will go into the details and write a bit about each operator and how a straight forward implementation might look if the operator is meant to work similar to built in operators.

 

The Rule of Zero -- Glennan Carnie

By Mantosh Kumar | Jan 15, 2015 06:18 PM | Tags: None

A complementary guideline to help to simplify the application code, without risking resource management issues.

The Rule of Zero

In a previous article – "The Rule of the Big Four (and a half)" we looked at resource management policies in C++.

Resource management is the general term for using the mechanisms in C++ to ensure that resources – files, dynamic memory, sockets, mutexes, etc – have their lifetimes automatically controlled so as to prevent resource leaks, deadlocks, etc. C++ refers to these mechanisms as RAII/RDID ( “Resource Acquisition Is Initialisation / Resource Destruction is Deletion”)

In this article we’ll have a look at a complementary guideline to help simplify your application code, without risking resource management issues – The Rule of Zero.

If you’re not familiar with the concepts of resource management I’d highly recommend having a look at the whitepaper before reading on.

C++ in 2015

By Meeting C++ | Jan 15, 2015 07:32 AM | Tags: community c++14 basics

My yearly overview on the things that might come:

C++ in 2015

by Jens Weller

From the article:

The year is still young, so lets have an outlook about what is going to happen in C++ Land in 2015...

Reader Q&A: auto and for loop index variables -- Herb Sutter

By Mantosh Kumar | Jan 14, 2015 06:58 PM | Tags: None

Discussion on how to use/replace auto for loop index variables.

Reader Q&A: auto and for loop index variables

by Herb Sutter

From the reader's question:

So I’ve been reading all I can about c++11/c++14 and beyond when time permits.  I like auto, I really do, I believe in it.  I have a small problem I’m trying to decide what to do about.  So in old legacy code we have things like this:

for (int i = 0; i < someObject.size(); i++) { … }