Inheritance Without Pointers

by Jonathan Boccara

Inheritance is a useful but controversial technique in C++. There is even a famous talk by Sean Parent called Inheritance is the base class of evil. So inheritance is not the most popular feature of the C++ community.

Nevertheless, inheritance is useful, and widely used by C++ developers.

What is the problem of inheritance? It has several problems, and one of them is that it forces us to manipulate objects through pointers...

Online C++ User Group Meetings in February 2021

by Jens Weller

The monthly overview of upcoming online C++ User Group meetings.

Tomorrow my Meeting C++ online Group meets to have a chat about C++ in Production! 17:00 CET!

GotW #98 Solution: Assertion levels

by Herb Sutter

This special Guru of the Week series focuses on contracts. We covered basic assertions in GotW #97... but not all asserted conditions are created equal.

Inlining and Compiler Optimizations

by Scott Wolchok

Why is inlining so important in C++? Clearly, it reduces function call overhead: if a function is inlined, there is no need to spend time setting up its arguments, jumping to it, creating a stack frame, and then undoing all that upon returning. More interestingly, though, inlining enables other compiler optimizations. In this article, I will show examples of constant propagation and loop-invariant code motion (LICM). Then, I will explain how inlining enables these optimizations to apply more widely and show an example of the consequences when that doesn’t happen...

C++ Best Practices

by Jason Turner

Level up your C++, get the tools working for you, eliminate common problems, and move on to more exciting things!

Build Throughput Series: More Efficient Template Metaprogramming

by Xiang Fan

In the previous blog post I shared how template specialization and template instantiation are processed in the MSVC compiler. We will now look at some examples from real-world code bases to show some ways to reduce the number of them...

Semaphores in C++20

by Rainer Grimm

Semaphores are a synchronization mechanism used to control concurrent access to a shared resource. They also allow it to play ping-pong...

Build Throughput Series: Template Metaprogramming Fundamentals

by Xiang Fan

Template metaprogramming is popular and seen in many code bases. However, it often contributes to long compile times. When investigating build throughput improvement opportunities in large codebases, our finding is that more than one million template specializations and template instantiations is quite common and often provides optimization opportunities for significant improvement.

In this blog post, I will walk through the differences between template specialization and template instantiation and how they are processed in the MSVC compiler...

4 Features of Boost HOF That Will Make Your Code Simpler

by Jonathan Boccara

Boost HOF, standing for Higher Order Functions, is a Boost library offering functions that work on functions.

This impressive library provides a lot of advanced components allowing to go a step further into functional programming in C++. In this post, we’ll focus on 4 of the more basic ones (+ a bonus one) that allow to make code simpler in common tasks.

HOF provides one header in the form of #include <boost/hof/XXX.hpp> for each component, as well as a general header #include <boost/hof.hpp>. It is compatible with C++11...

Performance Comparison of Condition Variables and Atomics in C++20

by Rainer Grimm

After the introduction to std::atomic_flag in my last post Synchronization with Atomics in C++20, I want to dive deeper. Today, I create a ping-pong game using condition variables, std::atomic_flag, and std::atomic<bool>. Let's play...