How to break or continue from a lambda loop? -- Vittorio Romeo

By Vittorio Romeo | May 22, 2025 06:04 AM | Tags: None

Is it possible to write a simple iteration API that hides implementation details and lets users break and continue?

Here's a new article about a lightweight solution using a `ControlFlow` enumeration!

How to break or continue from a lambda loop?

by Vittorio Romeo

From the article:

Here’s an encapsulation challenge that I frequently run into: how to let users iterate over an internal data structure without leaking implementation details, but still giving them full control over the loop?

Implementing a custom iterator type requires significant boilerplate and/or complexity, depending on the underlying data structure.

Coroutines are simple and elegant, but the codegen is atrocious – definitely unsuitable for hot paths.

Raw Loops for Performance? -- Sandor Dargo

By Blog Staff | May 21, 2025 04:43 PM | Tags: None

Using ranges or algorithms has several advantages over raw loops, notably readability. On the other hand, as we’ve just seen, sheer performance is not necessarily among those advantages. Using ranges can be slightly slower than a raw loop version. But that’s not necessarily a problem, it really depends on your use case. Most probably it won’t make a bit difference.

Raw Loops for Performance?

by Sandor Dargo

From the article:

To my greatest satisfaction, I’ve recently joined a new project. I started to read through the codebase before joining and at that stage, whenever I saw a possibility for a minor improvement, I raised a tiny pull request. One of my pet peeves is rooted in Sean Parent’s 2013 talk at GoingNative, Seasoning C++ where he advocated for no raw loops.

When I saw this loop, I started to think about how to replace it:

Please note that the example is simplified and slightly changed so that it compiles on its own.

Let’s focus on foo, the rest is there just to make the example compilable.

It seems that we could use std::transform. But heck, we use C++20 we have ranges at our hands so let’s go with std::ranges::transform!

constexpr Functions: Optimization vs Guarantee -- Andreas Fertig

By Blog Staff | May 19, 2025 04:40 PM | Tags: None

Constexpr has been around for a while now, but many don’t fully understand its subtleties. Andreas Fertig explores its use and when a constexpr expression might not be evaluated at compile time.

constexpr Functions: Optimization vs Guarantee

by Andreas Fertig

From the article:

The feature of constant evaluation is nothing new in 2023. You have constexpr available since C++11. Yet, in many of my classes, I see that people still struggle with constexpr functions. Let me shed some light on them.

What you get is not what you see

One thing, which is a feature, is that constexpr functions can be evaluated at compile-time, but they can run at run-time as well. That evaluation at compile-time requires all values known at compile-time is reasonable. But I often see that the assumption is once all values for a constexpr function are known at compile-time, the function will be evaluated at compile-time.

I can say that I find this assumption reasonable, and discovering the truth isn’t easy. Let’s consider an example (Listing 1).

constexpr auto Fun(int v) { return 42 / v; ① } int main() { const auto f = Fun(6); ② return f; ③ }

Listing 1

The constexpr function Fun divides 42 by a value provided by the parameter v ①. In ②, I call Fun with the value 6 and assign the result to the variable f.

Last, in ③, I return the value of f to prevent the compiler optimizes this program away. If you use Compiler Explorer to look at the resulting assembly, GCC with -O1 brings this down to:

  main:
          mov     eax, 7
          ret

As you can see, the compiler has evaluated the result of 42 / 6, which, of course, is 7. Aside from the final number, there is also no trace at all of the function Fun.

Now, this is what, in my experience, makes people believe that Fun was evaluated at compile-time thanks to constexpr. Yet this view is incorrect. You are looking at compiler optimization, something different from constexpr functions.

C++26: Erroneous Behaviour -- Sandor Dargo

By Blog Staff | May 17, 2025 04:37 PM | Tags: None

C++’s undefined behaviour impacts safety. Sandor Dargo explains how and why uninitialised reads will become erroneous behaviour in C++26, rather than being undefined behaviour.

C++26: Erroneous Behaviour

by Sandor Dargo

From the article:

If you pick a random talk at a C++ conference these days, there is a fair chance that the speaker will mention safety at least a couple of times. It’s probably fine like that. The committee and the community must think about improving both the safety situation and the reputation of C++.

If you follow what’s going on in this space, you are probably aware that people have different perspectives on safety. I think almost everybody finds it important, but they would solve the problem in their own way.

A big source of issues is certain manifestations of undefined behaviour. It affects both the safety and the stability of software. I remember that a few years ago when I was working on some services which had to support a 10× growth, one of the important points was to eliminate undefined behaviour as much as possible. One main point for us was to remove uninitialized variables which often lead to crashing services.

Thanks to P2795R5 by Thomas Köppe, uninitialized reads won’t be undefined behaviour anymore – starting from C++26. Instead, they will get a new behaviour called ‘erroneous behaviour’.

The great advantage of erroneous behaviour is that it will work just by recompiling existing code. It will diagnose where you forgot to initialize variables. You don’t have to systematically go through your code and let’s say declare everything as auto to make sure that every variable has an initialized value. Which you probably wouldn’t do anyway.

But what is this new behaviour that on C++ Reference is even listed on the page of undefined behaviour? [CppRef-1] It’s well-defined, yet incorrect behaviour that compilers are recommended to diagnose. Is recommended enough?! Well, with the growing focus on safety, you can rest assured that an implementation that wouldn’t diagnose erroneous behaviour would be soon out of the game.

Some compilers can already identify uninitialized reads – what nowadays falls under undefined behaviour. For example, clang and gcc with -ftrivial-auto-var-init=zero have already offered default initialization of variables with automatic storage duration. This means that the technique to identify these variables is already there. The only thing that makes this approach not practical is that you will not know which variables you failed to initialize.

Instead of default initialization, with erroneous behaviour, an uninitialized object will be initialized to an implementation-specific value. Reading such a value is a conceptual error that is recommended and encouraged to be diagnosed by the compiler. That might happen through warnings, run-time errors, etc.

Writing Senders -- Lucian Radu Teodorescu

By Blog Staff | May 15, 2025 04:32 PM | Tags: None

In the December issue of Overload [Teodorescu24], we provided a gentle introduction to senders/receivers, arguing that it is easy to write programs with senders/receivers. Then, in the February issue [Teodorescu25a], we had an article that walked the reader through some examples showing how senders/receivers can be used to introduce concurrency in an application. Both of these articles focused on the end users of senders/receivers. This article focuses on the implementer’s side: what does it take to implement senders?

Writing Senders

by Lucian Radu Teodorescu

From the article:

If people are just using frameworks based on std::execution, they mainly need to care about senders and schedulers. These are user-facing concepts. However, if people want to implement sender-ready abstractions, they also need to consider receivers and operation states – these are implementer-side concepts. As this article mainly focuses on the implementation of sender abstractions, we need to discuss these two concepts in more detail.

A receiver is defined in P2300 as “a callback that supports more than one channel” [P2300R10]. The proposal defines a concept for a receiver, unsurprisingly called receiver. To model this concept, a type needs to meet the following conditions:

• It must be movable and copyable.
• It must have an inner type alias named receiver_concept that is equal to receiver_t (or a derived type).
• std::execution::get_env() must be callable on an object of this type (to retrieve the environment of the receiver).

A receiver is the object that receives the sender’s completion signal, i.e., one of set_value(), set_error(), or set_stopped(). As explained in the December 2024 issue [Teodorescu24], a sender may have different value completion types and different error completion types. For example, the same sender might sometimes complete with set_value(int, int), sometimes with set_value(double), sometimes with set_error(std::exception_ptr), sometimes with set_error(std::error_code), and sometimes with set_stopped(). This implies that a receiver must also be able to accept multiple types of completion signals.

The need for completion signatures is not directly visible in the receiver concept. There is another concept that the P2300 proposal defines, which includes the completion signatures for a receiver: receiver_of<Completions>. A type models this concept if it also models the receiver concept and provides functions to handle the completions indicated by Completions. More details on how these completions look will be covered in the example sections.

Using Token Sequences to Iterate Ranges -- Barry Revzin

By Blog Staff | May 13, 2025 01:47 PM | Tags: None

There was a StackOverflow question recently that led me to want to write a new post about Ranges. Specifically, I wanted to write about some situations in which Ranges do more work than it seems like they should have to. And then what we can do to avoid doing that extra work.

Using Token Sequences to Iterate Ranges

by Barry Revzin

From the article:

The Problem

For the purposes of this post, I’m just going to talk about the very simple problem of:

for (auto elem : r) { 
use(elem); 
} 

In the C++ iterator model, this desugars into something like:

auto __it = r.begin(); 
auto __end = r.end(); 

while (__it != __end) { 
use(*__it); 

++__it; 
} 

I used a while loop here deliberately, because it’s a simpler construct and it lets me write the advance step last.

Now, if you want to customize the behavior of a range, those are your entry points right there. You can change what the initialization phase does (begin() and end()), you can change the check against completeness (__it != __end), you can change the read operation (*__it), and you can change the advance operation (++__it). That’s it. You can’t change the structure of the loop itself.

That alone is enough to offer a pretty large wealth of functionality. It’s a very powerful abstraction.

free performance: autobatching in my SFML fork -- Vittorio Romeo

By Vittorio Romeo | May 9, 2025 08:33 AM | Tags: None

This article shows how a very simple automatic batching strategy can be applied on top of SFML without affecting the library API, resulting in free performance for the end user!

free performance: autobatching in my SFML fork

by Vittorio Romeo

From the article:

In one of my previous articles, I discussed the design and implementation of the batching system in my fork of SFML. Wouldn’t it be nice if drawables were automatically batched, whenever possible?

AoS vs SoA in practice: particle simulation -- Vittorio Romeo

By Vittorio Romeo | May 9, 2025 08:32 AM | Tags: None

This article presents a practical benchmark of a particle simulation using both the AoS (Array of Structures) and SoA (Structure of Arrays) data layouts. How much performance can we gain by merely switching up the way our data is stored?

AoS vs SoA in practice: particle simulation

by Vittorio Romeo

From the article:

The benchmark simulates a large number of 2D particles that continuously change position, scale, opacity, and rotation. Through an ImGui-based UI1, you can choose the number of particles, toggle multithreading, and switch between AoS and SoA on the fly.

A demo is worth a thousand words, and since my fork of SFML supports Emscripten, you can try the benchmark directly in your browser. Play around with all the options – I’m curious to hear what results you get! [...]

Speeding up C++ Code with Template Lambdas -- Daniel Lemire

By Blog Staff | May 5, 2025 01:51 PM | Tags: None

Integer division is one of the most expensive operations in C++, but when the divisor is known at compile time, the compiler can optimize it significantly. This post explores different approaches—using templates, lambda expressions, and template metaprogramming—to speed up division while maintaining clean and efficient code.

Speeding up C++ Code with Template Lambdas

by Daniel Lemire

From the article:

Let us consider a simple C++ function which divides all values in a range of integers:

void divide(std::span<int> i, int d) {
 for (auto& value : i) {
 value /= d;
 }
}

A division between two integers is one of the most expensive operations you can do over integers: it is much slower than a multiplication which is, in turn, more expensive than an addition. If the divisor d is known at compile-time, this function can be much faster. E.g., if d is 2, the compiler might optimize away the division and use a shift and a few cheap instructions instead. The same is true with all compile-time constant: the compiler can often do better knowing the constant. (See Lemire et al., Integer Division by Constants: Optimal Bounds, 2021)

C++26: Removing Language Features -- Sandor Dargo

By Blog Staff | May 1, 2025 01:48 PM | Tags: None

C++ is often seen as an ever-growing language, with each new standard introducing powerful features while maintaining backward compatibility. However, C++26 takes a step toward simplification by officially removing deprecated features, including implicit arithmetic conversions for enumerations and direct comparisons of C-style arrays, both of which previously led to unintended behavior.

C++26: Removing Language Features

by Sandor Dargo

From the article:

Probably you all heard that C++ is an ever-growing language - I wrote so many times as well. Each standard indeed comes with a great bunch of highly-anticipated features. At the same time, due to binary compatibility considerations, very few old features are removed. This has several implications:

• we have probably more than one way to do something
• the standard keeps growing

This is true, but let’s not forget that each new standard removes some features. In this post, let’s review what are the language features that are removed in C++26 and in a later post, we’ll have a look at the removed library features.

At this point, it’s worth mentioning that a removal from the language usually happens in two steps. First a feature gets deprecated, meaning that its users would face compiler warnings for using deprecated features. As a next step, which in some cases never comes, the compiler support is finally removed.