Stroustrup receives 2015 Computer History Museum award

by Rachel Rose

The Computer History Museum Fellow Awards honor exceptional men and women whose ideas have changed the world. The fellowship is a lifetime award for individuals who have made major contributions to the computer industry. The list of fellows is a veritable Who's Who of the computer industry...

“This recognizes C++’s place in computing history and also honors the many people who helped make it one of the most successful programming languages ever and the many who used C++ to build awe-inspiring systems,” Stroustrup said of the award.

Convenient Constructs For Stepping Through a Range of Values

by Mikhail Semenov

In this article, the following loops are proposed:

for (auto x : step(start, count, step-width)) { ... }

for (auto x : step(count)) {...}

for (auto x : step_backward(count)) {...}

for (auto x : step_to(start, finish, step-width)) {...}

for (auto x : step_until(start, finish, step-width)) {...}

They are based on the C++11 for-range loop. In order to write such loops, the appropriate functions step, step_backward, step_to and step_until have to be implemented.  The article shows their implementation, discusses advantages of such loops and includes the benchmark results.

Find Your Favorite Library for C++ in NuGet

by Hong Hong

Many of you may know that NuGet is the “go-to” library repository for .NET development, but what about using it for C++? The answer here may surprise you as many of the top open source C++ libraries are actually sitting in the NuGet gallery...

C++Now 2015 Student/Volunteer Program Accepting Applications

The C++Now Student/Volunteer program was started in 2013 in an effort to encourage student involvement in the C++Now conference and the C++ community. Each year, the conference helps a small group of young programmers attend the conference. In exchange, the students help the C++Now staff in running the conference. Volunteers assist with various on-site tasks, such as recording sessions, escorting keynote speakers and setting up the conference picnic. They are able to attend most sessions. Volunteers receive a waiver of their registration fees and stipends for travel-related expenses may be provided.

Type Deduction and Why You Care

by Scott Meyers

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

C++98 had template type deduction, and it worked so intuitively, there was little need to understand what took place under the covers. C++11 extends type deduction to include universal references, applies it to auto variables and lambda expressions, then throws in a special auto-only deduction rule. C++14 pushes the boundary further, adding two forms of function return type deduction (auto and decltype(auto)) for arbitrary functions and offering auto parameters for lambdas. The result is that what could be treated as a black box in C++98 has become a topic that practicing C++ developers really need to understand. This talk will give you the information you need to do that.

JSON Voorhees, GitHub link

by Travis Gockel

JSON Voorhees is a JSON library written for the C++ programmer who wants to be productive in this modern world. What does that mean? There are a ton of JSON libraries floating around touting how they are "modern" C++ and so on. But who really cares? JSON Voorhees puts the focus more on the resulting C++ than any "modern" feature set. This means the library does not skip on string encoding details like having full support for UTF-8. Are there "modern" features? Sure, but this library is not meant to be a gallery of them – a good API should get out of your way and let you work. It is hosted on GitHub and sports an Apache License, so use it anywhere you need...

Iterators++, Pat 2

This is the third in a series about proxy iterators, the limitations of the existing STL iterator concept hierarchy, and what could be done about it. In the first post I explained what proxy iterators are (an iterator like vector<bool>‘s that, when dereferenced, returns a proxy object rather than a real reference) and three specific difficulties they cause in today’s STL:

1. What, if anything, can we say in general about the relationship between an iterator’s value type and its reference type?
2. How do we constrain higher-order algorithms like for_each and find_if that take functions that operate on a sequence’s elements?
3. How do we implement algorithms that must swap and move elements around, like sort and reverse?

C++17 Library Papers for Cologne

by Jens Weller

Last fall I did the last series about the Standardization papers for C++. I didn't had the time to finish the last part for the Library subgroup, as Meeting C++ 2014 was getting close too. I'll be attending the next meeting of the Library Working Group in Cologne, which is just a few days away, so I'll do a miniseries for the LWG papers...

Default Constructed Return Value: return {}

by Adi Shavit

It is common for C/C++ functions to return default values, for example, if some internal condition fails.
This is straightforward for native return types. This pattern is often seen in factory methods or functions that return a polymorphic type via a base handle.

If the function has multiple early return points, this default construction needs to be repeated at each such point and each time stating the explicit return type just for calling the default ctor. This is annoying because the compiler already knows the return type.

Persisting C++ Classes in Relational Databases with ODB

by Boris Kolpackov

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

ODB is an open source, cross-platform and cross-database (SQLite, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MS SQL Server, Oracle) object-relational mapping (ORM) system for C++. It allows you to persist C++ objects to a relational database without having to deal with tables, columns, or SQL, and without manually writing any mapping code.

In the first part of this two-part talk we will cover the basics of transactionally persisting, loading, updating, and deleting simple C++ classes in a database as well as querying the database for objects. We will then look into persisting C++ classes that have more interesting data members, such as containers and pointers to objects, or that form a polymorphic hierarchy. Support for C++11, Qt, and Boost value types, containers, and smart pointers will also be covered.

Targeting 5 different database systems at the same time may sound like a daunting task but as we will see it is not that hard with ODB. Life would also be a lot easier if our C++ classes never changed. The next best thing is to have comprehensive tooling support. So we will conclude the first half with a discussion of database schema evolution and its support in ODB.