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CppCon 2019: Mesh: Automatically Compacting Your C++ Application's Memory--Emery Berger

By Adrien Hamelin | Aug 12, 2020 11:12 AM | Tags: community

This year, CppCon 2020 is going virtual. The dates are still the same – September 14-18 – and we are aiming for the CppCon live event to have pretty much everything you’re familiar with at CppCon except moved online: multiple tracks including “back to basics” and a new “embedded” track; live speaker Q&A; live talk time zones friendly to Americas and EMEA (and we’re going to try to arrange around-the-clock recorded repeats in all time zones, where speakers who are available can be available for live Q&A in their repeated talks too, and we’ll do that if it’s possible – but we’re still working on it!); virtual tables where you can interact face-to-face online with other attendees just like at the physical event; virtual exhibitor spaces where you can meet the folks on your favorite product’s teams to ask them question face-to-face; pre- and post-conference classes; and even the CppCon house band playing live before every plenary session. All talk recordings will be freely available as usual on YouTube a month or two after the event, but everything else above will be available only live during CppCon week.

To whet your appetite for this year’s conference, here’s another of the top-rated talks from last year. Enjoy – and register today for CppCon 2020 – all the spirit and flavor of CppCon, this year all virtual and online!

Mesh: Automatically Compacting Your C++ Application's Memory

by Emery Berger

Summary of the talk:

Programs written in C++ can suffer from serious memory fragmentation, leading to low utilization of memory, degraded performance, and application failure due to memory exhaustion. This talk introduces Mesh, a plug-in replacement for malloc that, for the first time, eliminates fragmentation in unmodified C++ applications through compaction. A key challenge is that, unlike in garbage-collected environments, the addresses of allocated objects in C++ are directly exposed to programmers, and applications may do things like stash addresses in integers, and store flags in the low bits of aligned addresses. This hostile environment makes it impossible to safely relocate objects, as the runtime cannot precisely locate and update pointers. Mesh combines novel randomized algorithms with widely-supported virtual memory operations to provably reduce fragmentation, breaking long-established worst-case bounds on memory efficiency with high probability. Mesh generally matches the runtime performance of state-of-the art memory allocators while reducing memory consumption and eliminating pathological cases; in particular, Mesh reduces the memory of consumption of Firefox by 16% and Redis by 39%. There are efforts underway to incorporate Mesh's approach to eliminate fragmentation into existing allocators like tcmalloc and jemalloc; Mesh itself is available at https://github.com/plasma-umass/Mesh, and it can be used just by setting an environment variable.

Introducing ACCU Online - A Local Group With a Global Reach--Bob Schmidt

By Adrien Hamelin | Aug 11, 2020 12:44 PM | Tags: community

Will you attend?

Introducing ACCU Online - A Local Group With a Global Reach

by Bob Schmidt

From the article:

ACCU London is proud to host an ACCU Online event - a rescheduling of Chris Oldwood's previously cancelled "A Test of Strength" talk.

The event will be hosted virtually, on Remo. This will also give us the social and networking aspect of meet-ups that we miss from the in-person version.

When: Wednesday, 12th August 2020, 19:00 start...

CppCon 2019: C++20: The small things--Timur Doumler

By Adrien Hamelin | Aug 10, 2020 11:58 AM | Tags: community c++20

This year, CppCon 2020 is going virtual. The dates are still the same – September 14-18 – and we are aiming for the CppCon live event to have pretty much everything you’re familiar with at CppCon except moved online: multiple tracks including “back to basics” and a new “embedded” track; live speaker Q&A; live talk time zones friendly to Americas and EMEA (and we’re going to try to arrange around-the-clock recorded repeats in all time zones, where speakers who are available can be available for live Q&A in their repeated talks too, and we’ll do that if it’s possible – but we’re still working on it!); virtual tables where you can interact face-to-face online with other attendees just like at the physical event; virtual exhibitor spaces where you can meet the folks on your favorite product’s teams to ask them question face-to-face; pre- and post-conference classes; and even the CppCon house band playing live before every plenary session. All talk recordings will be freely available as usual on YouTube a month or two after the event, but everything else above will be available only live during CppCon week.

To whet your appetite for this year’s conference, here’s another of the top-rated talks from last year. Enjoy – and register today for CppCon 2020 – all the spirit and flavor of CppCon, this year all virtual and online!

C++20: The small things

by Timur Doumler

Summary of the talk:

C++20 comes with some big new language features: modules, coroutines, concepts, spaceship, and many new libraries. But apart from all those, C++20 also offers many small language improvements, making C++ more powerful and expressive, but also safer and more consistent.

This talk is an overview over all those smaller additions to the core language that will make your life easier. We will discuss much-needed improvements to existing facilities such as lambdas, CTAD, structured bindings, and initialisation, as well as brand-new language utilities that you may not yet have heard about!

CppCon 2019: A Unifying Abstraction for Async in C++--Eric Niebler, David Hollman

By Adrien Hamelin | Aug 7, 2020 12:44 PM | Tags: community

This year, CppCon 2020 is going virtual. The dates are still the same – September 14-18 – and we are aiming for the CppCon live event to have pretty much everything you’re familiar with at CppCon except moved online: multiple tracks including “back to basics” and a new “embedded” track; live speaker Q&A; live talk time zones friendly to Americas and EMEA (and we’re going to try to arrange around-the-clock recorded repeats in all time zones, where speakers who are available can be available for live Q&A in their repeated talks too, and we’ll do that if it’s possible – but we’re still working on it!); virtual tables where you can interact face-to-face online with other attendees just like at the physical event; virtual exhibitor spaces where you can meet the folks on your favorite product’s teams to ask them question face-to-face; pre- and post-conference classes; and even the CppCon house band playing live before every plenary session. All talk recordings will be freely available as usual on YouTube a month or two after the event, but everything else above will be available only live during CppCon week.

To whet your appetite for this year’s conference, here’s another of the top-rated talks from last year. Enjoy – and register today for CppCon 2020 – all the spirit and flavor of CppCon, this year all virtual and online!

A Unifying Abstraction for Async in C++

by Eric Niebler, David Hollman

Summary of the talk:

Async in C++ is in a sad state. The standard tools -- promises, futures, threads, locks, and std::async -- are either inefficient, broken, or both. Even worse, there is no standard way to say _where_ work should happen. Parallel algorithms, heterogeneous computing, networking & IO, reactive streams, and more: all critically important foundational technologies that await a standard abstraction for asynchronous computation.

In this talk, Eric Niebler and David Hollman dig into the Standard Committee's search for the basis operations that underpin all asynchronous computation: the long-sought Executor concept. The latest iteration of Executors is based on the Sender/Receiver programming model, which provides a generalization of many existing paradigms in asynchronous programming, including future/promise, message passing, continuation passing, channels, and the observer pattern from reactive programming. It also has surprising and deep connections to coroutines, which further demonstrates the model’s potential to be a truly unifying abstraction for asynchronous programming in C++20 and beyond.

Eric and David will present the short-term and long-term directions for Executors in ISO Standard C++, illustrating the design by walking through several implementation examples. They will talk about the direct connection between coroutines and the Sender/Receiver model and discuss what it means for the future of asynchronous APIs in C++. Finally, they will cover how the restrictions imposed by the Executors model should affect the way you write code today so your code is ready for the next big revolution in parallel and concurrent C++ programming.

CppCon Academy 2020

By Adrien Hamelin | Aug 5, 2020 09:38 AM | Tags: community

Are you interested?

CppCon Academy 2020

From the article:

CppCon Academy, the classes that we host before and after the main conference days, has successfully recruited from among the top C++ instructors in the world...

CppCon 2019: Everyday Efficiency: In-Place Construction (Back to Basics?)--Ben Deane

By Adrien Hamelin | Aug 5, 2020 09:31 AM | Tags: community

This year, CppCon 2020 is going virtual. The dates are still the same – September 14-18 – and we are aiming for the CppCon live event to have pretty much everything you’re familiar with at CppCon except moved online: multiple tracks including “back to basics” and a new “embedded” track; live speaker Q&A; live talk time zones friendly to Americas and EMEA (and we’re going to try to arrange around-the-clock recorded repeats in all time zones, where speakers who are available can be available for live Q&A in their repeated talks too, and we’ll do that if it’s possible – but we’re still working on it!); virtual tables where you can interact face-to-face online with other attendees just like at the physical event; virtual exhibitor spaces where you can meet the folks on your favorite product’s teams to ask them question face-to-face; pre- and post-conference classes; and even the CppCon house band playing live before every plenary session. All talk recordings will be freely available as usual on YouTube a month or two after the event, but everything else above will be available only live during CppCon week.

To whet your appetite for this year’s conference, here’s another of the top-rated talks from last year. Enjoy – and register today for CppCon 2020 – all the spirit and flavor of CppCon, this year all virtual and online!

Everyday Efficiency: In-Place Construction (Back to Basics?)

by Ben Deane

Summary of the talk:

Efficient C++ has always been about minimizing copies. This practically-focused
talk is about how to do that when working with move semantics, perfect
forwarding and STL containers, or non-STL containers that present similar
interfaces.

In-place construction is an easily stated goal, but can be really fiddly to get
right, especially given the foibles of various container interfaces. We'll talk
about copy elision; when to use emplace, insert, or other methods; vectors,
maps, optionals, variants; and how things change from C++11 through C++20.
Attendees will learn why in-place construction is beneficial and exactly how to
achieve optimal efficiency with the various standard container types.

CppCon 2019: 10 Techniques to Understand Existing Code--Jonathan Boccara

By Adrien Hamelin | Aug 3, 2020 11:29 AM | Tags: community

This year, CppCon 2020 is going virtual. The dates are still the same – September 14-18 – and we are aiming for the CppCon live event to have pretty much everything you’re familiar with at CppCon except moved online: multiple tracks including “back to basics” and a new “embedded” track; live speaker Q&A; live talk time zones friendly to Americas and EMEA (and we’re going to try to arrange around-the-clock recorded repeats in all time zones, where speakers who are available can be available for live Q&A in their repeated talks too, and we’ll do that if it’s possible – but we’re still working on it!); virtual tables where you can interact face-to-face online with other attendees just like at the physical event; virtual exhibitor spaces where you can meet the folks on your favorite product’s teams to ask them question face-to-face; pre- and post-conference classes; and even the CppCon house band playing live before every plenary session. All talk recordings will be freely available as usual on YouTube a month or two after the event, but everything else above will be available only live during CppCon week.

To whet your appetite for this year’s conference, here’s another of the top-rated talks from last year. Enjoy – and register today for CppCon 2020 – all the spirit and flavor of CppCon, this year all virtual and online!

10 Techniques to Understand Existing Code

by Jonathan Boccara

Summary of the talk:

One of the reasons why a lot of us work in C++ is because there is a huge amount of existing projects written in C++.

But existing code can be hard to understand.

In this presentation, you will learn how to make sense of code quickly, from the general big picture of the codebase all the way down to the little details of the code of a complex class.

The ten rules covered in this session will teach you to:
- start reading code from the end
- identify the parts of code that carry the most information
- locate the code of any feature visible in the application
- and many more!

Code reading techniques usually come with years and years of experience. This presentation will teach some of them to you right now, supported by code examples.

There is a wealth of talks about how to write C++ code using the latest features of the language, but there are very few talks about reading existing code. In particular the everyday code that people have in their codebases. And as the saying goes, code is read much more often than it is written.

This presentation aims at filling this need in a practical way, by exposing 10 techniques that conferences attendees can use on an everyday basis to understand quickly the code they get to work on, as soon as they go back to the office after the conference.

Reminder: CppCon 2020 early bird registration ends in two days

By Blog Staff | Aug 3, 2020 10:19 AM | Tags: None

cppcon2020-basic.PNGJust a reminder, early bird registration for the all-virtual CppCon 2020 ends in two days. Register soon to get the reduced rate for you and your team members! After August 5th, registrations will still be available at the regular rate.

CppCon 2020 will be held as an online conference. Registered attendees will get the full experience:

  • Talks delivered live, with live Q&A opportunities with speakers during their talks and in the "hallway track."
  • Virtual exhibitor booths, where you can interact live via videoconference with your favorite C++ product's developers.
  • The "hallway track," live video chat with other attendees at virtual tables with whiteboards.
  • ... and much more, including lightning talks, additional pre/post-conference classes, and the CppCon house band performing live from their studio in Seattle.

As always, the talk videos will be made freely available to everyone online about a month or two after the event. The other parts of the conference are not recorded, but are available live.

CppCon 2019: Naming is Hard: Let's Do Better--Kate Gregory

By Adrien Hamelin | Jul 31, 2020 08:00 PM | Tags: community

This year, CppCon 2020 is going virtual. The dates are still the same – September 14-18 – and we are aiming for the CppCon live event to have pretty much everything you’re familiar with at CppCon except moved online: multiple tracks including “back to basics” and a new “embedded” track; live speaker Q&A; live talk time zones friendly to Americas and EMEA (and we’re going to try to arrange around-the-clock recorded repeats in all time zones, where speakers who are available can be available for live Q&A in their repeated talks too, and we’ll do that if it’s possible – but we’re still working on it!); virtual tables where you can interact face-to-face online with other attendees just like at the physical event; virtual exhibitor spaces where you can meet the folks on your favorite product’s teams to ask them question face-to-face; pre- and post-conference classes; and even the CppCon house band playing live before every plenary session. All talk recordings will be freely available as usual on YouTube a month or two after the event, but everything else above will be available only live during CppCon week.

To whet your appetite for this year’s conference, here’s another of the top-rated talks from last year. Enjoy – and register today for CppCon 2020 – all the spirit and flavor of CppCon, this year all virtual and online!

Naming is Hard: Let's Do Better

by Kate Gregory

Summary of the talk:

C++ developers are famously bad at naming: our idioms, guidelines, and lore are rich in examples of terrible names. For example, consider RAII, which stands for scope bound resource management, or west const which perhaps should be const west, or all the samples that feature an object called x which is an instance of a class called X, and so on.

The good news is that naming well is a learned skill, and you can learn it, and start to name better right away. In this talk, I'll tell you why names matter, what benefits a good name can bring, and how to be better at naming. I'll discuss some categories of names and some common decisions within those categories. I'm not going to give you a set of rules to follow: this is about thinking and considering the meaning of the things you are naming. I will give you some questions to ask yourself and some structure that I use to help me to help those who read what I write.

I'll also address renaming things in existing (legacy) code, why and when to do it, and why getting it right the first time may not even be a realistic goal. You should be a lot more confident naming things after we spend this time together.