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CppCon 2023 ClangFormat Is Not It -- Anastasia Kazakova

By Blog Staff | Jun 1, 2024 02:00 PM | Tags: None

Registration is now open for CppCon 2024! The conference starts on September 15 and will be held in person in Aurora, CO. To whet your appetite for this year’s conference, we’re posting videos of some of the top-rated talks from last year's conference. Here’s another CppCon talk video we hope you will enjoy – and why not register today for CppCon 2024!

Lightning Talk: ClangFormat Is Not It

by Anastasia Kazakova

Summary of the talk:

Sometimes things are not what we think of them. But we keep using them based on our perception. ClangFormat is a widely used tool by the C++ community. Join me to explore the typical delusions around it.

Adding State to the Update Notification Pattern, Part 6 -- Raymond Chen

By Blog Staff | May 30, 2024 03:31 PM | Tags: None

Last time, we built a stateful but coalescing update notification using a change counter to identify which request is the latest one, but noted that it does unnecessary work. Let’s see if we can avoid the unnecessary work.

Adding State to the Update Notification Pattern, Part 6

by Raymond Chen

From the article:

We could add some early exits to abandon the work if we notice that we are no longer doing work on behalf of the most recent text change. It means that we have to switch the change counter variable to a std::atomic since we will be reading the variable from the background thread at the same time the UI thread may be modifying it.
class EditControl
{
    ⟦ ... existing class members ... ⟧

    std::atomic<unsigned> m_latestId;
};

winrt::fire_and_forget
EditControl::TextChanged(std::string text)
{
    auto lifetime = get_strong();

    auto id = m_latestId.fetch_add(1, std::memory_order_relaxed);

    co_await winrt::resume_background();

    if (!IsLatestId(id))) co_return;

    std::vector<std::string> matches;
    for (auto&& candidate : FindCandidates(text)) {
        if (candidate.Verify()) {
            matches.push_back(candidate.Text());
        }
        if (!IsLatestId(id))) co_return;
    }

    co_await winrt::resume_foreground(Dispatcher());

    if (!IsLatestId(id))) co_return;

    SetAutocomplete(matches);
}

bool EditControl::IsLatestId(unsigned id) 
{ 
 return id == m_latestId.load(std::memory_order_relaxed);
} 
The background worker periodically checks whether its work has been discarded and abandons its efforts if so.

HPX V1.10.0 released -- STE||AR Group

By Hartmut Kaiser | May 29, 2024 07:43 AM | Tags: performance parallelism heterogeneous computing distributed computing concurrency c++23 c++20 c++17 c++14 c++11

The STE||AR Group has released V1.10.0 of HPX -- A C++ Standard library for Concurrency and Parallelism.

HPX V1.10.0 Released

We have released HPX 1.10.0 — a major update to our C++ Standard Library for Concurrency and Parallelism. We have continued to modernize HPX to fully conform to the latest standardization efforts in the are of parallelism and concurrency. Our HPX documentation has seen a major overhaul for this release, please have a look here. We finished documenting the public local HPX API, we have added migration guides from widely used parallelization platforms to HPX (OpenMP, TBB, and MPI). Among other things, we have performed a lot of code cleanup and refactoring to improve the overall code quality and decrease compile times and to improve the consistency of our exposed APIs. The core implementation has seen many performance optimizations that impact every aspect of our applications.

If you have any questions, comments, or exploits to report you can reach us on IRC or Matrix (#ste||ar on libera.chat) or email us at hpx-users. We depend on your input!

You can download the release from our releases page or check out the v1.10.0 tag using git. A full list of changes can be found in the release notes.

HPX is a general-purpose parallel C++ runtime system for applications of any scale. It implements all of the related facilities as defined by the C++20 Standard. As of this writing, HPX provides the only widely available open-source implementation of the new C++17, C++20, and C++23 parallel algorithms, including a full set of parallel range-based algorithms. Additionally, HPX implements functionalities proposed as part of the ongoing C++ standardization process, such as large parts of the features related parallelism and concurrency as specified by the upcoming C++23 Standard, the C++ Concurrency TS, Parallelism TS V2, data-parallel algorithms, executors, and many more. It also extends the existing C++ Standard APIs to the distributed case (e.g., compute clusters) and for heterogeneous systems (e.g., GPUs).

HPX seamlessly enables a new Asynchronous C++ Standard Programming Model that tends to improve the parallel efficiency of our applications and helps reducing complexities usually associated with parallelism and concurrency.

Exploring the Impact of Top-Level cv-qualifiers on type-deduction -- Andreas Fertig

By Blog Staff | May 28, 2024 03:30 PM | Tags: None

In today's post, I will continue where I left off with last month's post Understanding the role of cv-qualifiers in function parameters. This time, I will focus on type deduction.

Exploring the Impact of Top-Level cv-qualifiers on type-deduction

by Andreas Fertig

From the article:

CppCon 2023 C++ Modules: Getting Started Today -- Andreas Weis

By Blog Staff | May 27, 2024 01:56 PM | Tags: None

C++ Modules: Getting Started Today

by Andreas Weis

Summary of the talk:

Modules have been one of the most highly anticipated features of C++20. Unfortunately, it was also the language feature that took the longest to become widely available for developers to use. This year, for the first time, we see broad support for the feature in all major compilers and mainstream build system support through CMake. The goal of this talk is to provide you with all the basic knowledge to allow you getting started with C++20 modules today.

We will take a look at how modules change the build process and why it took so long to implement them. We will take a tour of the essentials of the named modules mechanism and explore the new best practices for physical code structure in a modules-based code base, including how to set up a build with CMake. And last but not least, we will discuss different options for interacting with existing header-based code.

The talk will focus above all else on practicality: We will only be covering features that are widely available for use today with the latest compilers and build tools. We will give special attention to the areas where the design practices for modules differ from the familiar header-based approach and address common misconceptions and pitfalls that are typical among developers first encountering the feature. No prior knowledge of modules is required.

CppCon 2023 Higher-Order Template Metaprogramming with C++23 -- Ed Catmur

By Blog Staff | May 26, 2024 01:51 PM | Tags: None

Lightning Talk: Higher-Order Template Metaprogramming with C++23

by Ed Catmur

Summary of the talk:

C++20's Concepts transformed metaprogramming, but they can still be inflexible and are not readily composable. I demonstrate a few simple yet powerful techniques to allow building concepts from type traits, type transformations and even other concepts.

CppCon 2023 File I/O for Game Developers: Past, Present, and Future with C++ -- Guy Davidson

By Blog Staff | May 24, 2024 01:45 PM | Tags: None

File I/O for Game Developers: Past, Present, and Future with C++

by Guy Davidson

Summary of the talk:

If you have played a game on a computer in the last few decades, you will most likely have encountered a loading screen. This is used to advertise to the player that, among other things, data is being loaded from a storage device into the game. But why does this exist, why does it take so long, and how can we improve matters for the player?

In this talk we will discover the history of games and their development environments, the relationship between address space, RAM and storage hardware, how C++ abstracts file I/O and why it might not be the best fit for game developers, how a 64-bit address space changes everything, how #embed will change everything, and how C++29 (yes, 29) may upset the applecart yet again.

Although this talk is aimed at game developers who are often Windows programmers, it is relevant to anyone who has to read large amounts of data from local storage. Expect tales of woe, discovery and jubilation as I describe every surprising little thing I've learned about file I/O over the past 40 years and how C++ is heading for a great future in games.

std::expected - Monadic Extensions -- Bartlomiej Filipek

By Blog Staff | May 23, 2024 02:44 PM | Tags: None

The new std::expected feature from C++23 not only offers a robust error-handling mechanism but also introduces functional programming techniques like chaining operations with and_then, transforming results with transform, and managing errors using or_else and transform_error. This article explores these features, demonstrating how they can streamline your code by reducing redundant error checks while elegantly managing success and error states. Stay tuned as we dive into practical examples and see how these techniques are applied in real-world projects.

std::expected - Monadic Extensions

by Bartlomiej Filipek

From the article:

std::expected from C++23 not only serves as an error-handling mechanism but also introduces functional programming paradigms into the language. In this blog post, we’ll have a look at functional/monadic extensions of std::expected, which allow us to chain operations elegantly, handling errors at the same time. The techniques are very similar to std::optional extensions - see How to Use Monadic Operations for `std::optional` in C++23 - C++ Stories.

Here’s a brief overview of these functional capabilities:

and_then()

The and_then member function enables chaining operations that might produce a std::expected object. It’s invoked when the std::expected object holds a value and allows for seamless operation chaining without manual error checking after each step.

CppCon 2023 Back to Basics: Iterators in C++ -- Nicolai Josuttis

By Blog Staff | May 22, 2024 01:41 PM | Tags: None

Back to Basics: Iterators in C++

by Nicolai Josuttis

Summary of the talk:

One key success factor of C++ was the introduction of the Standard Template Library (STL) bringing together containers/ranges and algorithms using iterators as glue API to iterate over elements of collections.

This talk will present the basics of the design of iterators, the various consequences, remarkable corner cases, and what this means when using ranges and views as introduced with C++20.

Adding State to the Update Notification Pattern, Part 5 -- Raymond Chen

By Blog Staff | May 20, 2024 02:27 PM | Tags: None

Managing stateful notifications is challenging when multiple requests arrive, and the goal is to only notify about the latest one. In the EditControl class, we use a counter to track the most recent request, updating it on the UI thread to ensure accurate ordering and prevent stale data from being processed. This approach works but is inefficient due to redundant calculations. Next time, we'll refine this strategy for greater efficiency.

Adding State to the Update Notification Pattern, Part 5

by Raymond Chen

From the article:

We’ve been looking at the problem of a stateful but coalescing update notification, where multiple requests for work can arrive, and your only requirement is that you send a notification for the last one.

This time, we’ll apply the trick of using a counter to record who is doing the work on behalf of the most recent change. Here’s our first attempt:
class EditControl
{
    ⟦ ... existing class members ... ⟧

    unsigned m_latestId;
};

winrt::fire_and_forget
EditControl::TextChanged(std::string text)
{
    auto lifetime = get_strong();

    co_await winrt::resume_background();

    auto id = ++m_latestId;

    std::vector<std::string> matches;
    for (auto&& candidate : FindCandidates(text)) {
        if (candidate.Verify()) {
            matches.push_back(candidate.Text());
        }
    }

    co_await winrt::resume_foreground(Dispatcher());

    if (id != m_latestId) co_return;

    SetAutocomplete(matches);
}