Data Orientation For The Win! - Eduardo Madrid - CppCon 2021

By Adrien Hamelin | Jul 22, 2022 01:31 PM | Tags: performance

Registration is now open for CppCon 2022, which starts on September 11 and will again be held both in person and online. 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 2022 to attend in person, online, or both!

Data Orientation For The Win!

by Eduardo Madrid

Summary of the video:

C++ conferences have had presentations showing the important performance benefits of data-oriented design principles; however, the principles seem to require lots of "manual" effort and "code uglification"; these make the principles less practical, and there haven't been clear recommendations about how to deal with runtime-polymorphic types.

In this talk we will recapitulate on data orientation principles and their benefits showing their application through production-strength Generic Programming components made to support them.

Specific examples include:
1. Structures of arrays instead of arrays of complex structures (a.k.a. "scattering")
2. Support for data oriented designs for runtime-polymorphism without inheritance+virtual (the equivalent of using std::variant or std::function, but generalized as allowed by the Zoo type-erasure framework)
----1. Hybrid buffers: the equivalent of the virtual table pointer is scattered out of the objects solving the "Goldilocks problem" of how big the local buffer should be, objects occupy the available space optimally
----2. Easy (de)serialization through very easy relocatability
----3. Voiding the need for pointers in favor of indices into arrays

Pass-by-value vs Pass-by-reference--James Mitchell

By Adrien Hamelin | Jul 22, 2022 01:21 PM | Tags: advanced

Complex world.

Pass-by-value vs Pass-by-reference

by James Mitchell

From the article:

Let’s dig into the age old question, should you pass-by-value or pass-by-reference in C++? (or by pointer in C)

This blog post is mostly a re-post of a reddit comment that I made on r/cpp about pass-by-value and pass-by-reference, with some minor improvements, to make it easier to reference and save.

The answer isn’t as easy as it might seem, it depends on the Application Binary Interface (ABI) and your use-cases, there isn’t a one size fits all answer, this is even more the case for anything which is built to be cross platform.

First it’s probably good to break the problem down into two parts (focusing solely on performance, ignoring readability and maintainability which should often be more important)

• The language construct costs (copying, moving, etc)
• Compiler implications (aliasing, pointer provenance, etc)
• The ABI (the stack, registers, etc)...

Ranges Improvements with C++23--Rainer Grimm

By Adrien Hamelin | Jul 22, 2022 01:17 PM | Tags: c++23

The future is already coming.

Ranges Improvements with C++23

by Rainer Grimm

From the article:

Thanks to C++23, constructing containers will become more convenient. Additionally, the ranges library got more new views...

Porting my first application from Qt5 to Qt6

By Meeting C++ | Jul 22, 2022 03:00 AM | Tags: qt meetingcpp intermediate c++17 basics

An overview on the issues face when porting my first application to Qt6

Porting my first Application from Qt5 to Qt6

by Jens Weller

From the article:

Just this week I had the opportunity to recompile one of my Qt Applications to build it with Qt6. Here is some of the results.

The application in question manages parts of the conference, and hence is written in Qt for the UI and uses SQLite as datastorage, so Qt also used for this and as I learned for a few other things too...

CppCon 2022 Keynote: Contemporary C++ in Action -- Daniela Engert

By Blog Staff | Jul 21, 2022 03:51 PM | Tags: None

The third CppCon 2022 keynote has been announced! Daniela Engert is the world's top guru on C++ modules who isn't one of the compiler implementers, and will speaking about modules and so much more:

Daniela Engert live in person at CppCon 2022

Daniela Engert will be in Aurora, live in person to deliver a keynote that takes us on a journey through modern C++.

Daniela has been building computers and creating software for over forty years, with thirty years in the field of applied digital signal processing. Her recent focus has been on modules and helping developers best understand them and their application in C++20.

Here is her talk description:

Contemporary C++ in Action

This talk is different from typical conference presentations. Instead of focussing on one particular topic I want to take you with me on a journey where I put various pieces from the C++ landscape together into a small application and show how they fit together beautifully. My goal is to debunk the myth that the committee is looking to please experts and library developers instead of making life easier for the many developers in the trenches. This is not slideware, at the end of our tour the code will compile and run with some entertaining result.

On this journey, I will be visiting modules (using modularized popular libraries and others that constitute the app), do some network programming with coroutines (based on ASIO executors, as there are no C++ standard executors yet), slip in one or two of the flagship C++23 features, like explicit object parameters or some of the new library stuff, and season the stew with items from recent C++ standards. It’s a tiny application using techniques that an average programmer in the embedded or industrial world (like me) might find useful. The code I’ll show also contains very tiny fragments of condensed or simplified sources in active development taken from our in-house codebase – old and trusted, but thrust into the modern age.

Registration is now open so don’t miss out on CppCon 2022 this September 11-16. Register today! Tickets are now available for both online attendees and in-person attendees.

2022-07 Mailing Available

By Administrator | Jul 21, 2022 01:40 PM | Tags: None

The 2022-07 mailing of new standards papers is now available.

An experimental successor to C++

By Jordi Mon Companys | Jul 20, 2022 01:14 AM | Tags: experimental

An experimental successor to C++
 

About Carbon:

C++ remains the dominant programming language for performance-critical software, with massive and growing codebases and investments. However, it is struggling to improve and meet developers' needs outlined above, in no small part due to accumulating decades of technical debt. Incrementally improving C++ is extremely difficult, both due to the technical debt itself and challenges with its evolution process. The best way to address these problems is to avoid inheriting the legacy of C or C++ directly, and instead start with solid language foundations like a modern generics system, modular code organization, and consistent, simple syntax.

CppCon 2022 opening keynote: Bjarne Stroustrup, live in person

By Blog Staff | Jul 19, 2022 09:23 AM | Tags: None

CppCon 2022 will kick off on Monday, September 11 with Bjarne Stroustrup delivering the traditional opening keynote live in person in Aurora. Bjarne’s annual opening keynote for CppCon is one of the most anticipated and most watch talks in C++, and among the most viewed presentations on the CppCon YouTube Channel. Registration is open attend in person to be in the room for this keynote, to watch and submit questions live online, or do both...

Opening 2022 Keynote: C++ in Constrained Environments

Bjarne Stroustrup, live in person

C++ is widely used in constrained and/or critical applications and infrastructure components. How do we manage to use a large multi-purpose language in such environments? How can we better use facilities and techniques from modern C++ (C++11, C++14, C++17, C++20, and beyond)? The best answer is not “use only facilities available in C and C++ in 1985.”

This talk focuses on a top-down approach to achieve simplicity, maintainability, performance, and various forms of safety. It touches upon the C++ Core Guidelines, compile-time computation, type-and-resource safety, type deduction, the span and chrono standard libraries, and error handling.

Every year, Bjarne Stroustrup gives an important C++ talk in his CppCon opening keynote. Be at CppCon again this year, on-site or on-line, as Bjarne Stroustrup flies us above this complex landscape of issues and shines a spotlight on the most important things to know, and to think about, in C++ in 2022. This year we aim to leave extra extended time for real-time questions and answers with the live audience. Come to the talk, bring your questions, and don’t miss out!

Registration is now open for both online and in-person attendees so don’t miss out on CppCon 2022 this September 11-16. Register today!

CppCon 2022 opening keynote: Bjarne Stroustrup, live in person

By Blog Staff | Jul 19, 2022 09:23 AM | Tags: None

CppCon 2022 will kick off on Monday, September 11 with Bjarne Stroustrup delivering the traditional opening keynote live in person in Aurora. Bjarne’s annual opening keynote for CppCon is one of the most anticipated and most watch talks in C++, and among the most viewed presentations on the CppCon YouTube Channel. Registration is open attend in person to be in the room for this keynote, to watch and submit questions live online, or do both...

Opening 2022 Keynote: C++ in Constrained Environments

Bjarne Stroustrup, live in person

C++ is widely used in constrained and/or critical applications and infrastructure components. How do we manage to use a large multi-purpose language in such environments? How can we better use facilities and techniques from modern C++ (C++11, C++14, C++17, C++20, and beyond)? The best answer is not “use only facilities available in C and C++ in 1985.”

This talk focuses on a top-down approach to achieve simplicity, maintainability, performance, and various forms of safety. It touches upon the C++ Core Guidelines, compile-time computation, type-and-resource safety, type deduction, the span and chrono standard libraries, and error handling.

Every year, Bjarne Stroustrup gives an important C++ talk in his CppCon opening keynote. Be at CppCon again this year, on-site or on-line, as Bjarne Stroustrup flies us above this complex landscape of issues and shines a spotlight on the most important things to know, and to think about, in C++ in 2022. This year we aim to leave extra extended time for real-time questions and answers with the live audience. Come to the talk, bring your questions, and don’t miss out!

Registration is now open for both online and in-person attendees so don’t miss out on CppCon 2022 this September 11-16. Register today!

Configuration, Extension, Maintainability - Titus Winters - CppCon 2021

By Adrien Hamelin | Jul 18, 2022 08:57 AM | Tags: None

Registration is now open for CppCon 2022, which starts on September 11 and will again be held both in person and online. 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 2022 to attend in person, online, or both!

Configuration, Extension, Maintainability

by Titus Winters

Summary of the video:

Configurability should be considered a potential design smell, especially for systems and interfaces that will be in use for a long time. As an unfortunate result, “No, please don’t add that feature” must be a viable response to design proposals - just because a change can be made doesn’t mean it should. This is particularly challenging to square with a customer-focused product mindset: it’s hard to balance between long-term needs and immediate “the customer is always right.”

Providing options and toggles to configure settings gives users more freedom, but those settings become stale and brittle almost immediately, and regularly wind up pessimizing overall efficiency results. This is particularly true of rarely-used forms of extensibility and configuration. Of course, whatever sort of optionality and customization you provide will be hard to ever undo, because of Hyrum’s Law.

At the root of it, there is a fundamental tension between customization, extensibility, configuration vs. centralization, efficiency, and evolvability, and this tension needs to be considered when you are evaluating whether to add new customization and extensibility options. This talk will address some of the basic ways that design and invariants interact with long-term maintenance and optimization, and some heuristics for deciding whether adding a knob will turn out to be a mistake.