Video available: Bjarne Stroustrup, "The Evolution of C++: Past, Present, and Future" -- CppCon 2016

cppcon2016-stroustrup.PNGCppCon is in full swing, and once again all the sessions, panels, and lightning talks are being professionally recorded and will be available online -- about a month after the conference, because it takes time to process over 100 talks!

However, because of the importance of Bjarne's open keynote announcements on Monday, the team has pulled out the stops to process his video and get it up on YouTube (and maybe soon also Channel 9 for areas where YouTube is not available). It's there now, so if you couldn't be at CppCon on Monday in person, check it out:

The Evolution of C++: Past, Present, and Future (YouTube) (slides)

by Bjarne Stroustrup, CppCon 2016 opening keynote

Summary of the talk:

This is a philosophical talk. It deals with ideals, aims, and ways of approximating those. It deals with practical constraints and risks. It gives short examples. It presents a perspective of what drives the evolution of C++. What is C++ and what it must become over the next years for its success to continue? This involves both social and technical points. Towards the end, I discuss the direction of C++ future evolution, give some opinions, point to urgently needed new features, and discuss how to manage until they are part of the standard.

Vcpkg: a tool to acquire and build C++ open source libraries on Windows--Eric Mittelette

The Visual Studio Team has announced the availability of Vcpkg, a tool which simplifies acquiring and building open source libraries on Windows.

Vcpkg: a tool to acquire and build C++ open source libraries on Windows

From the article:

Acquiring native libraries on Windows is a critical part of the application development process; in our surveys, you told us that 80% of your C++ projects depend on two or more libraries...

CppCon 2015 Boost Units Library for Correct Code--Robert Ramey

Have you registered for CppCon 2016 in September? Don’t delay – Late registration is open now.

While we wait for this year’s event, we’re featuring videos of some of the 100+ talks from CppCon 2015 for you to enjoy. Here is today’s feature:

Boost Units Library for Correct Code

by Robert Ramey

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

I will give a presentation on the Boost Units library.

This library implements a zero runtime facility for performing dimensional analysis checking and automatic units conversion on C++ expressions. I have found this indispensable for coding scientific programs involving a variety of complex physical units. The documentation of the Boost Units library is totally complete and accurate, but totally inpenetrable. I had to spend way too much time figuring out how to use this. By attending this meeting, you're going to avoid this pain and just get the benefit of simpler programs that contain fewer bugs.

CppCast Episode 70: Maintaining Large Codebases with Titus Winters

Episode 70 of CppCast the only podcast for C++ developers by C++ developers. In this episode Rob and Jason are joined by Titus Winters from Google, about Google's strategies to maintain a 100M line monolithic codebase.

CppCast Episode 70: Maintaining Large Codebases with Titus Winters

by Rob Irving and Jason Turner

About the interviewee:

Titus Winters has spent the past 4 years working on Google's core C++ libraries. He's particularly interested in issues of large scale software engineer and codebase maintenance: how do we keep a codebase of over 100M lines of code consistent and flexible for the next decade? Along the way he has helped Google teams pioneer techniques to perform automated code transformations on a massive scale, and helps maintain the Google C++ Style Guide.

How to avoid bugs using modern C++

One of the main problems with C++ is having a huge number of constructions whose behavior is undefined, or is just unexpected for a programmer. Let's see which techniques in modern C++ help writing not only simple and clear code, but make it safer and more reliable.

How to avoid bugs using modern C++

by Pavel Belikov

From the article:

Of course, there are some flaws in the range-based for: it doesn't allow flexible management of the loop, and if there is more complex work with indexes required, then for won't be of much help to us. But such situations should be examined separately. We have quite a simple situation: we have to move along the items in the reverse order. However, at this stage, there are already difficulties. There are no additional classes in the standard library for range-based for. Let's see how it could be implemented.

CppCon 2015 Work Stealing--Pablo Halpern

Have you registered for CppCon 2016 in September? Don’t delay – Late registration is open now.

While we wait for this year’s event, we’re featuring videos of some of the 100+ talks from CppCon 2015 for you to enjoy. Here is today’s feature:

Work Stealing

by Pablo Halpern

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

If you've used a C++ parallel-programming system in the last decade, you've probably run across the term "work stealing." Work stealing is a scheduling strategy that automatically balances a parallel workload among available CPUs in a multi-core computer, using computation resources with theoretical utilization that is nearly optimal. Modern C++ parallel template libraries such as Intel(R)'s TBB or Microsoft*'s PPL and language extensions such as Intel(R) Cilk(tm) Plus or OpenMP tasks are implemented using work-stealing runtime libraries.

Most C++ programmers pride themselves on understanding how their programs execute on the underlying machine. Yet, when it comes to parallel programming, many programmers mistakenly believe that if you understand threads, then you understand parallel runtime libraries. In this talk, we'll investigate how work-stealing applies to the semantics of a parallel C++ program. We'll look at the theoretical underpinnings of work-stealing, now it achieves near optimal machine utilization, and a bit about how it's implemented. In the process, we'll discover some pit-falls and how to avoid them. You should leave this talk with a deeper appreciation of how parallel software runs on real systems.

Previous experience with parallel programming is helpful but not required. A medium level of expertise in C++ is assumed.