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CppCon 2015 Racing The File System--Niall Douglas

By Adrien Hamelin | Aug 22, 2016 01:44 PM | Tags: boost advanced

Have you registered for CppCon 2016 in September? Don’t delay – 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:

Racing The File System

by Niall Douglas

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

Almost every programmer knows about and fears race conditions on memory where one strand of execution may concurrently update data in use by another strand of execution, leading to an inconsistent and usually dangerous inconsistent read of program state. Almost every programmer therefore is aware of mutexes, memory ordering, semaphores and the other techniques used to serialise access to memory.

Interestingly, most programmers are but vaguely aware of potential race conditions on the filing system, and as a result write code which assumes that the filing system does not suddenly change out from underneath you when you are working on it. This assumption of a static filing system introduces many potential security bugs never mind ways of crashing your program, and of course creating data loss and corruption.

This workshop will cover some of the ways in which filing system races can confound, and what portable idioms and patterns you should employ to prevent misoperation, even across networked Samba shares. Finally, an introduction of the proposed Boost library AFIO will be made which can help application developers writing filing system race free code portably.

CppChat 2015-08-21: Jason Turner and Matt Bentley

By Jon Kalb | Aug 22, 2016 04:43 AM | Tags: None

Video chat:

CppChat 08-21 with Jason and Matt

with Jason Turner, Matt Bentley, and Jon Kalb

From the chat:

We discuss CppCon sessions including Matt's session on the game-friendly containers that he has created and Jason's plenary talk about writing a game for Commodore 64 in C++17, the reprisal of his award-winning C++Now talk on "Practical Performance Practices," and his talk with Rob Irving on their CppCast experiences. Along the way we discuss the history of the 6502 and Stepanov's observation that the STL was not designed with today's hardware in mind.

How Bloomberg is Advancing C++ at Scale--John Lakos

By Adrien Hamelin | Aug 19, 2016 02:03 PM | Tags: efficiency community

Interesting interview:

How Bloomberg is Advancing C++ at Scale

by John Lakos

From the article:

John Lakos manages the Bloomberg Development Environment group, which offers a set of C++ software libraries, development tools, and methodology to well over a thousand Bloomberg developers. He is an authority on large-scale C++ software infrastructure, receiving recent acclaim for two publications by Pearson Education on methodology for industrial software development [Part 1, Part 2]. BDE and its libraries are open source and can be found on GitHub. In this conversation, Lakos discusses the importance of instilling process and discipline in all software development projects...

CppCon 2015 C++ Rcpp: Seamless R and C++ Integration--Matt P. Dziubinski

By Adrien Hamelin | Aug 19, 2016 01:52 PM | Tags: performance community

Have you registered for CppCon 2016 in September? Don’t delay – 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:

Rcpp: Seamless R and C++ Integration

by Matt P. Dziubinski

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

R is an open-source statistical language designed with a focus on data analysis. While its historical roots are in statistical applications, it is currently experiencing a rapid growth in popularity in all fields where data matters: from data science, through bioinformatics and finance, to machine learning. Key strengths contributing to this growth include its rich libraries ecosystem (over 6 thousands packages at the moment of writing) – often authored by the leading researchers in the field, providing early access to the latest techniques; beautiful, high-quality visualizations – supporting seamless exploratory data analysis and producing stunning presentations; all of this available in an interactive environment resulting in high productivity through fast iteration times.

At the same time, there are no free lunches in programming: the dynamic, interactive nature of R does have its costs, including a significant impact on run-time performance. In an era of growing data sizes and increasingly realistic models this concern is only becoming more important.

In this talk we provide an introduction to Rcpp – a library allowing smooth integration of R with C++, combining the productivity benefits of R for data science together with the performance of C++. First released in 2005, today it’s the most popular language extension for R -- used by over 400 packages. We'll also discuss challenges (as well as possible solutions) involved in integrating modern C++ code, and demonstrate the usage of popular C++ libraries in practice. We’ll conclude the talk with the RInside package allowing to embed R in C++.

CppCon 2015 C++ on the Web: Ponies for developers without pwn’ing users--JF Bastien

By Adrien Hamelin | Aug 17, 2016 01:51 PM | Tags: performance community

Have you registered for CppCon 2016 in September? Don’t delay – 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:

C++ on the Web: Ponies for developers without pwn’ing users

by JF Bastien

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

Is it possible to write apps in C++ that run in the browser with native code speed? Yes. Can you do this without the security problems associated with running native code downloaded from the net? Yes and yes. Come to this session to learn how.

We'll showcase some resource-intensive applications that have been compiled to run in the browser. These applications run as fast as native code with access to cornerstone native programming APIs—modern C++ STL, OpenGL, files and processes with full access to C++’s concurrency and parallelism—all in an architecture- and OS-agnostic packaging. Then, we'll describe how we deliver native code on the web securely, so developers get their C++ ponies and users don’t get pwn’d. We’ll also touch on the fuzzing, code randomization, and sandboxing that keep the billions of web users safe.