7 Reasons C++ Devs Will Love the VS 14 CTP -- Nish Sivakumar

By Blog Staff | Jul 26, 2014 05:34 PM | Tags: None

Fresh on CodeProject:

7 Reasons C++ Devs Will Love the VS 14 CTP

by Nish Sivakumar

From the article:

This is by no means a comprehensive list of C++ features added in the VS 14 CTPs, nor does it try to be. It's merely a small selection of C++ language and IDE features that I felt were attractive to a C++ developer from a practical point of view. These are features that I feel developers could start using in their code right away...

Boost 1.56.0 beta 1 released

By marshall | Jul 18, 2014 08:09 AM | Tags: boost

Boost release 1.56.0 beta 1 is now available from SourceForge

This release contains 2 new libraries:

• Align: Memory alignment functions, allocators, and adaptors, from Glen Fernandes.
• Type_Index: Runtime/Compile time copyable type info, from Antony Polukhin.

Modularization

Boost version control has migrated to a system using git submodules. This shouldn't make too much of a difference to users, although the directory structure is now a bit different.

Parts of some libraries have been moved into different modules, and several new modules have been extracted from existing code. All header paths should remain the same.

The new modules are:

• Assert: Customizable assert macros. Maintained by Peter Dimov.
• Core: Core utilities used by other libraries, with minimal dependencies. Maintained by Peter Dimov, Glen Fernandes and Andrey Semashev.
• Lexical_Cast: General literal text conversions, such as an int represented a string, or vice-versa, from Kevlin Henney.
• Throw_Exception: A common infrastructure for throwing exceptions from Boost libraries, from Emil Dotchevski.
• Winapi: Windows API declarations without <windows.h>, for internal Boost use.

For details of what's in the release, see http://www.boost.org/users/history/version_1_56_0.html.

Note that the links to files on this web page are for the final release - use the SourceForge link above to get the beta files.

Please download the beta, give it a try. If you encounter any problems, please report them on the boost mailing list.

Solaris Studio 12.4 Beta update 7/2014

By SteveClamage | Jul 15, 2014 01:34 PM | Tags: None

The Oracle Solaris Studio 12.4 Beta, Update 7/14 release is now available for download.

This update includes new features and enhancements based on current user feedback during the Beta program. We look forward to getting additional feedback!

Feature highlights in this update include:

• Additional support for C++11, including full support for Lambda expressions and initializer lists
• Updated Performance Analyzer with a completely redesigned UI that automatically saves your configuration settings and allows you to save custom configurations, new Heap data view, new metrics to track IPC/CPI, and call-tree enhancements
• Updated Code Analyzer with performance and memory usage improvements
• OpenMP 4.0 implementation tuned for the latest Oracle systems
• And many more features, enhancements and fixes in response to user feedback

Learn More and explore resources including the What's New guide and the latest videos and articles.

POCO Development Release 1.5.3 Available -- Guenter Obiltschnig

By Blog Staff | Jul 1, 2014 02:34 PM | Tags: None

A minor update of POCO is available with some new functionality. Release 1.5.3 is planned to be the last in the series of 1.5.x development releases. Next is 1.6.0. and 2.0, with introduction of C++11/14 features.

POCO Development Release 1.5.3 Available

by Guenter Obiltschnig

We're told by the POCO labs that the list of major 1.5.3 additions is as follows:

New Libraries:

• SevenZip

New Classes:

• Poco::Clock
• Poco::Net::NTPClient

New major features:

• Windows PowerShell build script

New Platforms supported:

• SmartOS
• Windows Embedded Compact 2013

JetBrains ReSharper for C++ -- Daria Dovzhikova

By Blog Staff | Jul 1, 2014 02:16 PM | Tags: None

For those interested in checking out some new C++ refactoring tools support, if you're working in Visual Studio, news from JetBrains:

ReSharper for C++ EAP Goes On

by Daria Dovzhikova

From the article:

As you might have already heard the Early Access Program for ReSharper with C++ support is in progress.

We prepared a new build and wanted to share a quick update on what new features and options it brings to the table: ...

CMake 3.0.0 Released

By Hauke | Jun 12, 2014 05:52 PM | Tags: None

A new major version of CMake, v3.0.0 has been released. CMake is a tool for cross platform C/C++ (and more) build poject configuration.

Version 3.0.0 contains many improvements. To get an idea of the recent changes, as well as the improvements of CMake over the last months and years, take a look at the following links:

• Release announcements/changes
• Modern tutorial

IBM XL C/C++ 13.1 supports =default/=delete, constexpr, nullptr

By Blog Staff | Jun 12, 2014 02:49 PM | Tags: None

XL C/C++ and AIX and Linux is now available:

XL C/C++ for AIX and Linux, V13.1 Now Released!

We're happy to announce the release of the XL C/C++ for AIX, V13.1 and XL C/C++ for Linux, V13.1 compilers!  The V13.1 release delivers POWER8 exploitation and new compiler and language features.

From the announcement details:

IBM® XL C/C++ for Linux™ is a standards-based, high performance C/C++ compiler with advanced optimizing features. XL C/C++ for Linux, V13.1 delivers a number of new features and enhancements:

• Exploitation of the latest IBM POWER8™ architecture
• Support for additional features in C11 and C++11, the current standards for the C and C++ programming languages
• Partial support for the OpenMP 4.0 industry specification
• Compile and runtime performance improvements
• Additional performance options
• New program diagnostics and error detection features

...

C++11 programming standard

C++11 is the latest standard for the C++ programming language, published as ISO/IEC 14882:2011. With V13.1, partial support for the C++11 standard continues with the implementation of the following features:

Defaulted and deleted functions

This feature introduces two new forms of function declarations to define explicitly defaulted functions and deleted functions. For the explicitly defaulted functions, the compiler generates the default implementations, which are more efficient than manually programmed implementations. The compiler disables the deleted functions to avoid calling unwanted functions.

You can use the -qlanglvl=defaultanddelete option to enable this feature.

Generalized constant expressions

The generalized constant expressions feature extends the set of expressions permitted within constant expressions. The implementation of this feature in XL C/C++ V12.1 was a partial implementation of what is defined in the C++11 standard. In this release, enhancements are made to support user-defined constexpr objects and constexpr pointers or references to constexpr functions and objects.

You can use the -qlanglvl=constexpr option to enable this feature.

The nullptr keyword

This feature introduces nullptr as a null pointer constant. The nullptr constant can be distinguished from integer 0 for overloaded functions. The constants of 0 and NULL are treated as the integer type for overloaded functions, whereas nullptr can be implicitly converted to only the pointer type, pointer-to-member type, and bool type.

You can use the -qlanglvl=nullptr option to enable this feature.

Qt 5.3 released

By Blog Staff | May 21, 2014 09:51 AM | Tags: None

Qt 5.3 is now available.

Qt is the most widely-known and -used portable UI framework for C++. It offers native code performance and modern sophisticated user experiences across desktop, embedded, and mobile platforms. Both commercial and open source versions are available.

More details from the Qt 5.3 product page:

With Qt 5.3 a lot of effort was put into enhancing the overall quality and user experience across all the platforms. Qt 5.2 introduced a completely new dimension into cross-platform: the mobile platforms and it has been downloaded an amazing amount of more than 1 million times!

...

• Added Qt Positioning API support for Android and iOS. Use the GPS directly from convenient Qt APIs!
• Qt Bluetooth API has now support for Android as well
• Printing support for Qt has been greatly enhanced
• Qt 5.3 ships with Qt Creator 3.1, which also introduced a lot of enhancements and stability to existing features as well as an initial support for WinRT tooling, a new clang-based code model and improved Android tool chain integration.

libstudxml: A modern XML API for C++

By Boris Kolpackov | May 21, 2014 07:48 AM | Tags: None

libstudxml is an XML library for modern, standard C++. It has an API that I believe should have already been in Boost or even in the C++ standard library.

The API was first presented at the C++Now 2014 conference. Based on the positive feedback and encouragement I received during the talk, I've decided to make the implementation generally available.

As an example, we can parse this XML:

<person id="123">
  <name>John Doe</name>
  <age>23</age>
  <gender>male</gender>
</person>

With the following C++ code, which performs all the validation necessary for this XML vocabulary:

enum class gender {...};

ifstream ifs (argv[1]);
parser p (ifs, argv[1]);

p.next_expect (parser::start_element, "person", content::complex);

long id = p.attribute<long> ("id");

string n = p.element ("name");
short a = p.element<short> ("age");
gender g = p.element<gender> ("gender");

p.next_expect (parser::end_element); // person

The API has the following interesting features:

• Streaming pull parser and streaming serializer
• Two-level API: minimum overhead low-level & more convenient high-level
• Content model-aware (empty, simple, complex, mixed)
• Whitespace processing based on content model
• Validation based on content model
• Validation of missing/extra attributes
• Validation of unexpected events (elements, etc)
• Data extraction to value types
• Attribute map with extended lifetime (high-level API)

libstudxml is compact, external dependency-free, and reasonably efficient. The XML parser is a conforming, non-validating XML 1.0 implementation that is based on tested and proven code. The library is released under the MIT license.

More information, documentation, and source code are available from libstudxml project page. Or, you can jump directly to the API description with examples.

just::thread C++11 and C++14 Thread Library V2.0 released

By Blog Staff | May 19, 2014 09:19 AM | Tags: None

just::thread 2.0 is now available.

Anthony Williams' implementation of the C++11 and C++14 threading library adds support for gcc 4.8 and Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 and with a number of new features.

just::thread now includes:

• The new std::shared_timed_mutex and std::shared_lock from C++14 allow for multiple readers to hold a shared lock on a mutex or one writer to hold an exclusive lock.

• The extensions to the futures from the upcoming C++ Concurrency Technical Specification in the form of continuations. std::future<> and std::shared_future<> now have an additional member function "then()" which allows a further task to be scheduled when the future becomes "ready". This allows for improved support for asynchronous tasks.

• jss::when_any and jss::when_all encapsulate a set of futures into a single future which becomes ready when either one or all of the provided futures becomes ready. This can be used with continuations to schedule asynchronous tasks to run when the prerequisites are ready.

• A new lock wrapper jss::generic_lock_guard is provided. This is a concrete type rather than a template, and will lock any type of mutex which provides lock and unlock member functions.