Events

CppCon 2019: Speed Is Found In The Minds of People--Andrei Alexandrescu

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!

Speed Is Found In The Minds of People

by Andrei Alexandrescu

Summary of the talk:

In all likelihood, sorting is one of the most researched classes of algorithms. It is a fundamental task in Computer Science, both on its own and as a step in other algorithms. Efficient algorithms for sorting and searching are now taught in core undergraduate classes. Are they at their best, or is there more blood to squeeze from that stone? This talk will explore a few less known – but more allegro! – variants of classic sorting algorithms. And as they say, the road matters more than the destination. Along the way, we'll encounter many wondrous surprises and we'll learn how to cope with the puzzling behavior of modern complex architectures.

CppCon 2019: C++ Code Smells--Jason Turner

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++ Code Smells

by Jason Turner

Summary of the talk:

There are a lot of rules to remember for writing good C++. Which features to use? Which to avoid? The C++ Core Guidelines would be over 500 pages long if you were to try to print it! What happens if we swap this around and instead of Best Practices look at Code Smells. Coding decisions that should make you think twice and reconsider what you are doing.

We will ask:

* What are the most important code smells?
* Does it simplify the way we write code?

CppCon 2020 Embedded Track--Ben Saks

Will you attend?

CppCon 2020 Embedded Track

by Ben Saks

From the article:

Every year, CppCon offers C++ programmers a chance to exchange ideas with the rest of the C++ community. With the growing interest in autonomous vehicles, wearable devices, and IoT, embedded systems programming makes up an ever larger part of the community. In 2020, CppCon will expand on its past coverage of embedded topics by offering its first official Embedded Track...

CppCon 2019: Writing Safety Critical Automotive C++ Software for AI Hardware--Michael Wong

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!

Writing Safety Critical Automotive C++ Software for High Performance AI Hardware

by Michael Wong

Summary of the talk:

How can we make C++ in a Safe and secure way?
It is about time we talk about what it takes to create safe software, especially for automotive. This talk is about the practical engineering challenges of turning deep learning, classical machine vision and sensor fusion algorithms from research prototypes into real-world automotive-grade systems. We will summarize the many safety critical standards in general for C++ and specifically for autonomous vehicles (AV). These include the updates to MISRA, AUTOSAR, and our own SG12 which has been processing updates from WG23 for C++. We have been working hard in these standards bodies and with industrial partners to deliver automotive-grade, safe, high performance AI software development tools.
We will further review C++ Directions that supports this and reveal the road map for what is possibly the earliest Safety Critical C++ that is also capable of heterogeneous dispatch for AV.

CppCon 2020 Back to Basics Track--Arthur O'Dwyer

Will you attend?

CppCon 2020 Back to Basics Track

by Arthur O'Dwyer

From the article:

In 2020, as in 2019, CppCon will have a Back to Basics Track. This track’s mission is to cover all the essentials of modern C++. Each session in the track is about a single concrete topic, often expressible in just one or two words: Templates. Exception-safety. Move semantics. Our goal is to fit these sessions together like jigsaw pieces to produce a track that covers “everything you need to know” to be a working programmer in today’s C++ community...

CppCon 2019: Floating-Point <charconv>: Making Your Code 10x Faster With C++17's Final Boss--STL

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!

Floating-Point <charconv>: Making Your Code 10x Faster With C++17's Final Boss

by Stephan T. Lavavej

Summary of the talk:

Floating-point numbers are ancient, mysterious, and terrifying. Over the past 30 years, the C and C++ Standards have provided many functions for floating-point/string conversions, such as C's strtof(), strtod(), and printf() %a %e %f %g, and C++'s iostreams, stof(), stod(), and to_string(). Despite this history, floating-point is far from a solved problem - these functions have ranged from annoyingly to egregiously slow, and application developers and library maintainers alike have found it exceedingly difficult to understand floating-point behavior.

This session will present new and wondrous developments in the area of floating-point conversions. If your serialization code is bottlenecked by floating-point printing, this will accelerate your code by roughly 3x to 30x (yes, times, not percent). You can also improve the human-readability of your output. Along the way, this session will cover the basics of floating-point representations, dispelling common myths like fuzziness and non-determinism.

Specifically, C++17 added 3 pages of Standardese describing the charconv header and its functions from_chars() and to_chars(). This feature has required an unexpectedly large amount of implementation work, taking over a dev-year for MSVC and becoming the last C++17 library feature to ship. Coincidentally, Ulf Adams at Google developed a novel algorithm named Ryu, which is responsible for the amazing speed of to_chars(). This session will focus on how to use charconv and how to understand its many supported formats, with a brief overview of Ryu's techniques.

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

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

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...