Trip Report: C++ Standards Committee Meeting in Rapperswil, June 2014 -- Botond Ballo

By Blog Staff | Jul 21, 2014 11:03 AM | Tags: None

Here's one participant's view of the recent standards meeting with some interesting personal perspective.

Trip Report: C++ Standards Committee Meeting in Rapperswil, June 2014

by Botond Ballo

From the article:

Last [month] I attended another meeting of the ISO C++ Standards Committee in Rapperswil, Switzerland (near Zurich). This is the third Committee meeting I have attended; you can find my reports about the previous two here (September 2013, Chicago) and here (February 2014, Issaquah). These reports, particularly the Issaquah one, provide useful context for this post.

With C++14′s final ballot being still in progress, the focus of this meeting was the various language and library Technical Specifications (TS) that are planned as follow-ups to C++14, and on C++17. ...

Delegating Constructors in C++11 -- 741MHz

By Blog Staff | Jul 21, 2014 04:52 AM | Tags: basics

In case you missed it on 741MHz:

Delegating Constructors in C++11

by 741MHz

From the article:

C++ has caught up with other popular object-oriented languages such as Scala, Java, C# and others when it comes to constructor delegation, a feature that is now supported as per 2011 core language specification of ISO C++. This solves a common problem with repetitive coding, which is tedious and fragile, that C++ programmers had to do in order to provide multiple class constructors.

...

C++11 allows that a constructor of a class type “A” may have an initializer list that invokes another constructor of the same type. Therefore, programmers can get rid of undesirable common initialization function and duplicate all at once by writing the code like this: ...

Inline Functions -- Andrzej Krzemieński

By Blog Staff | Jul 14, 2014 08:18 AM | Tags: intermediate

Today from Andrzej:

Inline Functions

by Andrzej Krzemieński

From the article:

Inlining functions can improve or worsen your program’s performance (however you define ‘performance’). It has been described in detail in Herb Sutter’s GotW #33. Compiler can decide to inline your function, even if it was not declared inline and conversely: it can decide not to inline it even if it is declared inline. So, you might be tempted to think that declaring functions as inline has no useful portable meaning in C++. This is not so. I have found inline functions useful, and its usefulness has nothing to do with inlining...

Writing min function, part 2: Understanding Concepts

By Fernando Pelliccioni | Jul 11, 2014 09:56 AM | Tags: advanced

This is the second article of the series called “Writing min function.” I want complete the min function and fix the mistakes mentioned in the previous post. But first, we have to understand Concepts, so...

Writing min function, part 2: Understanding Concepts

by Fernando Pelliccioni

A Cheat Sheet for HTTP Libraries in C++ -- Vladimir

By Blog Staff | Jul 11, 2014 08:37 AM | Tags: intermediate

Recently on Kukuruku:

A Cheat Sheet for HTTP Libraries in C++

By Vladimir

From the article:

... I decided to make a cheat sheet with examples of HTTP requests in C++ using different libraries. I guess Kukuruku is the best place for keeping such cheat sheets.

We’re going to take a look at the following libraries:

• WinInet
• WinHttp
• Casablanca
• Qt
• POCO
• wxWidgets
• Boost.Asio
• libcurl
• neon
• .NET (С++/CLI)
• IXMLHTTPRequest
• HappyHttp
• cpp-netlib

Erasing the Concrete -- K-ballo

By Blog Staff | Jul 8, 2014 11:53 PM | Tags: intermediate

Have you heard of "type erasure"?

Erasing the Concrete

by K-ballo

From the article:

Type erasure is any technique in which a single type can be used to represent a wide variety of types that share a common interface. In the C++ lands, the term type-erasure is strongly associated with the particular technique that uses templates in the interface and dynamic polymorphism in the implementation.

A union is the simplest form of type erasure.

• It is bounded, and all participating types have to be mentioned at the point of declaration.

A void pointer is a low-level form of type erasure. Functionality is provided by pointers to functions that operate on void* after casting it back to the appropriate type.

• It is unbounded, but type unsafe.

Virtual functions offer a type safe form of type erasure. The underlying void and function pointers are generated by the compiler.

• It is unbounded, but intrusive.
• Has reference semantics.

A template based form of type erasure provides a natural C++ interface. The implementation is built on top of dynamic polymorphism.

• It is unbounded and unintrusive.
• Has value semantics.

Two years of Meeting C++! -- Jens Weller

By Blog Staff | Jul 8, 2014 10:57 PM | Tags: None

A lot has changed in just two years. Check this out for some visibility into the European C++ scene.

Two years of Meeting C++!

by Jens Weller

Note: Jens will be giving two talks at two talks at CppCon, including "Founding User Groups." He knows what he's talking about... from the article:

While I only know of 3 active User Groups around 2011/early 2012 (Oslo, Belgium & Düsseldorf), the active user Groups in Europe are a huge success, showing the popularity of C++: ... Also note, that I haven't listed active ACCU Groups, there exist a few in Great Britain, but I'm not sure when they started and how active they are. In total there currently 17 User Groups being active in 2014 or 2013.

C++11 Final Override -- 741MHz

By Blog Staff | Jul 8, 2014 10:39 PM | Tags: intermediate basics

A good article posted last year and making the rounds again this week:

C++11 Final Override

by 741MHz

From the article:

C++11 introduces two important keywords in relation to polymorphism and inheritance — the override and final. Using those keywords should become a habit of any C++ developer. It is worth using every time except when writing a base class. This will make the code clear, maintainable, and potentially save hours that would have been otherwise wasted chasing an error in debugger.

Quick Q: When are copy and move operations automatically generated? -- StackOverflow

By Blog Staff | Jun 30, 2014 11:53 AM | Tags: None

Recently on SO:

What are the rules for automatic generation of move operations?

In C++98, the C++ compiler could automatically generate copy constructor and copy assignment operator via member-wise copy, e.g.

struct X {
    std::string s;
    std::vector<int> v;
    int n;
};

The compiler automatically generates copy constructor and copy assignment operator for X, using member-wise copy.

But how do things change in C++11 with move semantics?

Are the move constructor and move assignment operator automatically generated, like copy constructors and copy assignment operators?

Are there cases in which move operations are not automatically generated?

Quick Q: Is vector storage contiguous? -- Stack Overflow

By Blog Staff | Jun 30, 2014 09:50 AM | Tags: basics

Quick A: Yes.

Recently on SO:

std::vector: contiguous data and copy/move

I have two questions for the following code: 1) Will the elements of faces be contiguous? 2) Does std::vector copy or move Face f when inserting it?

#include <vector>   
int main()
{
    struct Face {};
    std::vector<Face> faces;

    for (int i=0; i<10; ++i)
    {
        Face f;

        faces.push_back (f);
    }

    return 0;
}