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By Andrey Karpov | Dec 10, 2014 08:11 AM | Tags: None
Today on viva64:
Why Students Need the CppCat Code Analyzer
by Andrey Karpov
CppCat is a simple static code analyzer capable of detecting bugs in C/C++ programs. We started granting free academic licenses to all interested (students, teachers, and so on). For the sake of popularizing CppCat among students, I decided to write this post about errors that can be found in student lab work tasks posted at Pastebin.com...
By Felix Petriconi | Dec 10, 2014 08:02 AM | Tags: performance
Blaze, an open-source, high-performance C++ math library for dense and sparse arithmetic, released their new version.
Blaze 2.2 Released
After a total of five and a half months, a little late for SC'14, but right on time for Meeting C++, we finally release Blaze 2.2! But the waiting time was worthwhile! This release comes with several bug fixes and hundreds of improvements, many based on your hints, suggestions and ideas. Thank you very much for your support and help to make the Blaze library even better!
The big new feature of Blaze 2.2 is symmetric matrices. And this is not just any implementation of symmetric matrices, but one of the most complete and powerful implementations available. See the Blaze tutorial to get an idea of how symmetric matrices work and how they can help you prevent some inadvertent pessimizations of your code.
By Razvan Pascalau | Dec 8, 2014 05:33 PM | Tags: openmp intermediate compiler clang
A status update for the work done on OpenMP for Clang/LLVM and future directions presented at the 2014 LLVM Developers' Meeting. The slides are also available here.
OpenMP* Support in Clang/LLVM: Status Update and Future Directions
OpenMP is a well-known and widely used API for shared-memory parallelism. Support for OpenMP in Clang/LLVM compiler is currently under development. In this talk, we will present current status of OpenMP support, what is done and what remains to be done, technical details behind OpenMP implementation. Also, we will elaborate on accelerators and pragma-assisted SIMD vectorization, introduced in the latest 4.0 edition of the OpenMP standard.
By ltorje | Dec 8, 2014 03:27 AM | Tags: None
More support for creating all-C++ Android applications:
Developing Native-Activity (Android) applications in Visual Studio 2015
by Ankit Asthana
From the article:
Visual Studio 2015 preview (download here) introduces the ability for developers to create Android Native Activity application as a part of the cross-platform mobile development. Android platform with Android Native Activity (API Level 9) introduced the capability to create pure C/C++ applications. While there is some hidden Java JNI code in the background the idea is to abstract this detail away from the developer. Native Activity applications are popular for gaming (e.g. Unreal 4) and graphic intensive (OpenGL) applications. This post will guide you through the experience of creating a Native Activity application and walking through the developer lifecycle of editing, building and debugging Native Activity code...
Background: The Android NDK was first released in 2009 offering the possibility to use C++ code in Android applications. Since NDK 5 (released in Dec 2010) it is even possible to create a complete native Android app in C++ but even with the continuous improvements of the SDK/NDK it was easier to develop Android applications in Java than in C++.
By Razvan Pascalau | Dec 8, 2014 12:05 AM | Tags: tools product compiler basics
Version 3.2 of ccache was recently released. It can help you be more productive as "It speeds up recompilation by caching previous compilations and detecting when the same compilation is being done again" (from the official page). The new version that has been released is a feature version which means lots of goodies and new features.
ccache 3.2 released
From the announcement:
stat calls.__DATE__ and __TIME__ tokens in the hashed source code.CCACHE_PREFIX.-c option is no longer passed to the preprocessor. This fixes problems with clang and Solaris’s C++ compiler.-D and -I to the compiler when compiling preprocessed output. This fixes warnings emitted by clang.And much more ...
By Adrien Hamelin | Dec 3, 2014 02:13 PM | Tags: intermediate embedded
E.S.R. Labs presents its STL library adapted to embedded environments and discusses some of the choices they made for it:
C++ STL for Embedded Developers
by John Hinke
From the article:
C++ embedded programming is very difficult. There are some limitations that are not always present in traditional programming environments such as limited memory, slower processors, and older C++ compilers.
We have developed a set of best-practice processes and frameworks to support writing high-quality embedded applications...
By Adrien Hamelin | Dec 3, 2014 01:43 PM | Tags: None
Valgrind, a useful tool for any C++ developer released a new version today:
Valgrind 3.10.1 released
From the announcement:
3.10.1 is a bug fix release. It fixes various bugs reported in 3.10.0 and backports fixes for all reported missing AArch64 ARMv8 instructions and syscalls from the trunk. If you package or deliver 3.10.0 for others to use, you might want to consider upgrading to 3.10.1 instead.
By kevstev | Dec 2, 2014 03:41 PM | Tags: None
A preview what is going into C++17 after the recent Standards Committee meeting.
GoingNative 32: Sneak Preview of C++17
By Gabriel Ha
From the article:
Join us with ISO Committee member (and Microsoft as well, of course =P) Gabriel Dos Reis, who graciously took the time to give us the inside scoop of some things that made it into C++17, as well as things that got taken out. All this is fresh off the press of the most recent C++ Standards Meeting...
By Razvan Pascalau | Dec 1, 2014 07:11 AM | Tags: performance gcc efficiency compiler advanced
Fresh on the Intel Developer Zone blog:
New optimizations for X86 in upcoming GCC 5.0
by Evgeny Stupachenko
From the article:
Part 1. Vectorization of loads/stores group.
GCC 5.0 significantly improves vector code quality for load groups and store groups. By loads/stores group I mean iterated consecutive sequence of loads/stores. For example:
x = a[i], y = a[i + 1], z = a[i + 2]iterated by “i” is loads group of size 3...
The most frequent case where loads/stores groups are applicable is array of structures.
- Image conversion (RGB structure to some other) ...
- N-dimentional coordinates. (Normalize array of XYZ points) ...
- Multiplication of vectors by constant matrix: ...
... GCC 5.0:
- Introduces vectorization of load/store groups of size 3
- Improves load groups vectorization for all supported sizes
- Maximizes load/store groups performance by generating code that is more optimal for particular x86 CPU...
By Felix Petriconi | Dec 1, 2014 02:02 AM | Tags: intermediate
Some months ago Facebook brought their C/C++ Facebook-Lint (Flint) analyzer into public domain and made it available on github.com/facebook/flint. Flint provides a lint framework and a number of C++11/14 style rules that we have found useful in our company.
This static code analyzer is not based on a C++ parser, but works with a tokenizer, completely written in D. (The previous C++ version of the program is still part of the repository.)
Andrei Alexandescu gives detailed information in his blog entry:
Under the Hood: Building and open-sourcing flint
by Andrei Alexandrescu
... Writing a C++ linter in particular is not for the faint of heart because of C++'s high barrier to entry for parsing. That said, there are now dozens of C++ lint programs with a variety of features, some open sourced. So the natural question is why we chose to write our own instead of using a pre-existing one.
When we started this project, the lint programs we tried were too slow and most didn't support the C++11 features that our codebase had already started to use. Clang, which today would be logical starting point for a C++ analysis tool, offered too little support back then...
The distributed makefile is designed to work on Mac OS and Linux. But it is pretty easy to build a working flint.exe for Windows with Visual Studio and an installed D compiler and the corresponding plugin.
We prefer in our company either pairing or code reviews to ensure a high code quality. But we decided to use Flint as an additional safety-net and since the speed of the analyzer is so amazingly high, we were able to integrate it into the pre-commit hook of our Mercurial repository without any noticable performance drawbacks. So all to be committed C++ files are checked against a subset of all rules, that Flint supports.
(We disabled some Flint rules in the source code, because of missing C++11 capabilities of Visual Studio 2012/2013 and certain checks that does not make sence in our context.)
Consider automatically applying a lint tool in your project build. Whether you pick this or another one, it's worth checking out.
