C++ User Group Meetings November

By Meeting C++ | Nov 2, 2013 04:58 PM | Tags: intermediate community basics

An overview of C++ User Groups which meet in November:

C++ User Group Meetings in November

by Jens Weller

From the Article:

November has come, Meeting C++ Conference is soon...
... and also 12 C++ User Groups are meeting...

Compiling and Linking in C++ -- Rusty Ocean

By Blog Staff | Nov 1, 2013 03:01 PM | Tags: basics

Life'n'gadget just published a nice overview of the basic C++ compilation model, useful for people who are new to programming in C++.

Compiling and Linking in C++

by Rusty Ocean

From the article:

When you write a C++ program, the next step is to compile the program before running it. The compilation is the process which convert the program written in human readable language like C, C++ etc into a machine code, directly understood by the Central Processing Unit. There are many stages involved in creating a executable file from the source file. The stages include Preprocessing, Compiling and Linking in C++...

Duetto: A C++ compiler for the Web going beyond emscripten and node.js

By Blog Staff | Oct 31, 2013 09:49 AM | Tags: None

Learning Technologies Ltd. has released a new Clang-based C++ compiler for the Web:

Duetto: a C++ compiler for the Web going beyond emscripten and node.js

From the announcement:

Today Lean­ing Tech­nolo­gies Ltd. releases duetto, a com­piler designed to develop integrated (back­end and fron­tend) web appli­ca­tions in C++. duetto is now avail­able to the pub­lic as FOSS here, and will be offered in a com­mer­cial pack­age with closed-source-friendly licens­ing soon.

[... duetto] allows to pro­gram both the fron­tend and the back­end of a Web appli­ca­tion in an inte­grated C++ code­base, com­pil­ing them respec­tively to JavaScript and native code.

Duetto com­bines the advan­tages of emscripten and node.js by allow­ing the pro­gram­mer to:

• write web appli­ca­tions in C++, reusing exist­ing code and mak­ing port­ing of whole appli­ca­tions and games to the browser plausible.
• code both the fron­tend and the back­end of a web appli­ca­tion in the same lan­guage and codebase

In addi­tion to this, duetto pro­vides some nice features:

• Bring the robust­ness and proven scal­a­bil­ity of C++ pro­gram­ming to the Web
• You can access all browser APIs directly. Duetto inher­its the C++ phi­los­o­phy of expos­ing the plat­form capa­bil­i­ties (and lim­i­ta­tions) to the users. There is no mid­dle man.
• Duetto is based on LLVM/clang. An indus­try stan­dard C++ com­piler is a programmer’s best friend: code san­ity is ver­i­fied as com­pile time, includ­ing RPC signatures.
• The LLVM tool­chain also guar­an­tees that a mind-blowing set of opti­miza­tions is run at com­pile time, gen­er­at­ing highly effi­cient code. This decreases the bur­den on JavaScript JIT com­piler at runtime.
• Con­trar­ily to emscripten we do not try to emu­late a tra­di­tional address space using typed arrays, but directly map C++ objects to JS objects. This reduces mem­ory con­sump­tion since the garbage col­lec­tor can delete unused object.

New Adventures in C++ with Cinder and More -- Ale Contenti

By NoSenseEtAl | Oct 31, 2013 08:15 AM | Tags: intermediate

The Cinder C++ library for graphics got a shout-out from Herb Sutter at GoingNative'13, and now we get a full hour-long talk about Cinder from Visual Studio's own Ale Contenti.

New Adventures in C++ with Cinder and More

Play and be productive with modern C++, graphics, on-the-fly projects and more! Starting from the latest Going Native 2013 talks as an inspiration, we will explore how easy is to mold ideas into graphics apps with C++ and Cinder, and how simple tools and techniques can help us be more productive in Visual Studio!

Watch the video, or download the slides.

ODB C++ ORM 2.3.0 Released, Adds Schema Evolution Support

By Boris Kolpackov | Oct 30, 2013 09:48 AM | Tags: None

ODB is an open source object-relational mapping (ORM) system for C++. It allows you to persist C++ objects to a relational database without having to deal with tables, columns, or SQL and without manually writing any of the mapping code.

Major new features in this release:

• Support for database schema evolution, including automatic schema migration, immediate and gradual data migration, as well as soft object model changes (ability to work with multiple schema versions using the same C++ classes). For a quick showcase of this functionality see the Changing Persistent Classes section in the Hello World Example chapter.
• Support for object sections which provide the ability to split data members of a persistent C++ class into independently loaded/updated groups.
• Support for automatic mapping of C++11 enum classes.

A more detailed discussion of these features can be found on the blog. For the complete list of new features in this version see the official release announcement.

ODB is written in portable C++ (both C++98/03 and C++11 are supported) and you should be able to use it with any modern C++ compiler. In particular, we have tested this release on GNU/Linux (x86/x86-64/ARM), Windows (x86/x86-64), Mac OS X (x86), and Solaris (x86/x86-64/SPARC) with GNU g++ 4.2.x-4.8.x, MS Visual C++ 2005, 2008, 2010, and 2012, Sun Studio 12u2, and Clang 3.x.

The currently supported database systems are MySQL, SQLite, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and SQL Server. ODB also provides optional profiles for Boost and Qt, which allow you to seamlessly use value types, containers, and smart pointers from these libraries in your persistent classes.

More information, documentation, source code, and pre-compiled binaries are available on the project's page.

Quick Q: Is 'auto' type deduction static (compile time) or dynamic (run time)?

By Blog Staff | Oct 29, 2013 01:56 PM | Tags: basics

Recently on StackOverflow:

C++ 11 auto compile time or runtime?

auto a = 10;

When compiler knows a is int, at compile time or at run-time? If it deduce type at run-time, will it not affect performance?

Interview: Bjarne Stroustrup Discusses C++ -- William Wong

By Blog Staff | Oct 29, 2013 09:51 AM | Tags: None

William Wong recently interviewed Bjarne Stroustrup for Electronic Design.

Interview: Bjarne Stroustrup Discusses C++

by William Wong

Much of the content will be familiar to those who've seen or read other recent interviews, but it's a nice concise summary of the essence of C++ including examples in code. If someone you know wonders why C++ was created, or what is the essence of its purpose as a language, or how modern C++ code looks and feels, this article is a good place to send them.

Why does std::condition_variable take a std::unique_lock instead of a std::mutex? -- StackOverflow

By Blog Staff | Oct 25, 2013 03:54 AM | Tags: None

Recently on StackOverflow, someone asked: What's the job of std::unique_lock when used with std::condition_variable::wait()?

A more detailed answer is available in this earlier question, including why taking a unique_lock makes the C++ version superior to some other libraries' designs:

C++11: Why does std::condition_variable use std::unique_lock?

I am a bit confused about the role of std::unique_lock when working with std::condition_variable. As far as I understood the documentation, std::unique_lock is basically a bloated lock guard, with the possibility to swap the state between two locks.

I've so far used pthread_cond_wait(pthread_cond_t *cond, pthread_mutex_t *mutex) for this purpose (I guess that's what the STL uses on posix). It takes a mutex, not a lock.

What's the difference here? Is the fact that std::condition_variable deals with std::unique_lock an optimization? If so, how exactly is it faster?

Trip report: Fall ISO C++ meeting -- Michael Wong

By Blog Staff | Oct 24, 2013 04:16 PM | Tags: intermediate

Michael Wong, head of Canadian delegation, has posted Part 1 of his report on the September ISO C++ meeting held in Chicago.

The View from the C++ Standard meeting September 2013 Part 1

by Michael Wong

From the article:

At this meeting, the most important thing was to address as many of the National Body (NB) Comments from the draft C++14 CD possible. This will enable us to be in good shape for the release of C++14 in 2014. Please look at my blog series to get an idea of the major content. However, this meeting did have some interesting minor changes which modified that content. This is fairly normal to decouple features which is still controversial. The biggest change is the moving of VLA (or what we called Array of Runtime Bound) and dynarray into a library array TS, and the adoption of the single quote as a digit separator for C++14.

This week in C++: EDG 4.8 and Visual C++ 2013

By Blog Staff | Oct 24, 2013 09:08 AM | Tags: None

The past week saw new releases of two major C++ implementations, with a focus on standards conformance improvements.

Edison Design Group (EDG) shipped version 4.8 of their C++ compiler front-end. This is the first EDG C++ release to achieve full C++11 language conformance. It adds support for C++11 inheriting constructors, user-defined literals, thread_local variables, alignment support (alignof and alignas), and complete decltype support.

Note: You can't buy a complete compiler from EDG, but EDG's front-end is a key part of several major commercial compilers and tools. With the availability of 4.8, this means that EDG-based products such as Intel's ICC compiler could achieve full language conformance when they can integrate the EDG 4.8 front-end in a future release.

Microsoft shipped Visual C++ 2013, a major update to VC++ 2012 with additional C++ conformance features. Since last year's release, VC++ 2013 adds the following ISO C++ features: explicit conversion operators, raw string literals, function template default arguments, delegating constructors, { } uniform initialization syntax and initializer_lists, variadic templates, non-static data member initializers, =default, =delete, and using aliases. This release also include some small post-C++11 features that were approved earlier this year for inclusion in the draft of the upcoming C++14 standard, including make_unique, nonmember cbegin/cend, the improved <functional> operator functors such as greater<>, and the new transformation trait type aliases such as remove_reference_t.

At the GoingNative conference in September, Microsoft also announced that before the end of the year it expects to release a follow-on "alpha" or preview compiler containining initial implementations of additional C++11 language features, likely including 'some or all of' the following: implicit move function generation, & and && qualifiers on member functions, __func__, extended sizeof, thread-safe initialization of function local static variables, unconditional noexcept, constexpr on functions other than constructors, and possibly inheriting constructors. The CTP is also expected to include support for several new draft-standard C++14 language features, including auto function return type deduction, decltype(auto), and possibly the much-anticipated C++14 marquee feature generic lambdas. It will likely also include an initial implementation of the await concurrency language feature that is being proposed for possible inclusion in a future standard.