Support for Android CMake projects in Visual Studio--Ion Todirel

By Adrien Hamelin | Dec 17, 2015 03:01 AM | Tags: intermediate

Discover a functionnality of Visual Studio:

Support for Android CMake projects in Visual Studio

by Ion Todirel

From the article:

CMake is a cross-platform project generator that enables reuse of shared C++ code across multiple IDE and project systems.

We made a change to CMake to support our Android toolchain in Visual Studio. With this change, you can take your existing CMake project targetting Android, and with minimal modifications, you can have it open in Visual Studio, and benefit from our rich IDE experience for Android...

CppCast Episode 37: Ranges with Eric Niebler

By robwirving | Dec 11, 2015 07:47 AM | Tags: None

Episode 37 of CppCast the only podcast for C++ developers by C++ developers. In this episode Rob and Jason are joined by Eric Niebler to discuss his work on Ranges and the future of the Standard Library.

CppCast Episode 37: Ranges with Eric Niebler

by Rob Irving and Jason Turner

About the interviewee:

Eric Niebler is an independent consultant specializing in C++ library development. Currently, he is working on modernizing the C++ standard library and adding support for ranges, funded by the first-ever grant from the Standard C++ Foundation. Previously, Eric was a consultant for BoostPro computing, a member of Microsoft's Visual C++ team, and a Microsoft Researcher before that. In addition, he has several libraries in Boost and is a Boost release manager and steering committee member. Eric has been an active member of the C++ Standardization Committee for well over 10 years. He speaks regularly at C++ conferences around the world.

In a previous life, Eric drifted with no fixed address, writing C++ and blog entries from cafes and beaches around the world. Today, Eric is a family man living and working in the glorious Pacific Northwest near Seattle.

Oracle Solaris Studio 12.5 Beta

By SteveClamage | Dec 10, 2015 01:00 PM | Tags: None

Oracle Solaris Studio 12.5 Beta Release

The Oracle Solaris Studio 12.5 Beta release is now available for download from OTN.  Oracle Solaris Studio delivers highly optimized compilers, advanced analysis tools and a multi-language aware IDE for easy development of fast, reliable and secure applications for Oracle Solaris and Linux operating systems.

Key Benefits:

• Increased application security with Oracle SPARC M7 Silicon Secured Memory integration and built-in security checking capabilities.
• Latest language standard support, including C++14, C++11 and C11, and easy compilation of open source applications with improved GCC compatibility.
• Performance optimizations for the latest Oracle systems and updates throughout the tool suite for creating faster applications, faster

Clang with Microsoft CodeGen in VS 2015 Update 1--Dave Bartolomeo

By Adrien Hamelin | Dec 7, 2015 01:36 AM | Tags: c++14 c++11

You can now easily verify if Clang can compile your code on Windows:

Clang with Microsoft CodeGen in VS 2015 Update 1

by Dave Bartolomeo and the Clang/C2 feature crew

From the article:

One of the challenges with developing and maintaining cross-platform C++ code is dealing with different C++ compilers for different platforms. You write some code that builds fine with the Visual C++ compiler for your Windows-targeting build, but then your Android-targeting build breaks because Clang is stricter about standards conformance and your code was accidentally depending on Visual C++ being more permissive. Or, you write new code that builds successfully with Clang for iOS, only to find out that you used a relatively new C++ language feature that Visual C++ does not yet support, and now you have to either re-implement the code without using that language feature, or maintain a separate implementation that works with Visual C++ for your Windows build.

To make it easier to develop cross-platform code that works well for both Windows and other platforms, we’ve released an additional compiler toolset for Visual Studio called Clang with Microsoft CodeGen. This compiler uses the open-source Clang parser for C and C++, along with the code generator and optimizer from the Visual C++ compiler. This lets you compile your cross-platform code for Windows using the same Clang parser that you use for other targets, while still taking advantage of the advanced optimizations from the Visual C++ optimizer when you build for Windows. Because the new toolset uses the same Clang parser used for non-Windows targets, you won't need to have annoying #ifdefs throughout the code just to account for differences between the compilers. Also, your code can take advantage of language features that are not currently available in the Visual C++ compiler, including C99 complex types and C++14 extended constexpr support. And because the Clang-based compiler generates the same debug information format as the Visual C++ compiler, you'll still be able to debug your code with the same great Visual Studio debugger experience.

C++ Core Guidelines Checkers available for VS 2015 Update 1--Andrew Pardoe and Neil MacIntosh

By Adrien Hamelin | Dec 7, 2015 01:31 AM | Tags: intermediate experimental

Coding well in C++ is becoming easier:

C++ Core Guidelines Checkers available for VS 2015 Update 1

by Andrew Pardoe and Neil MacIntosh

From the article:

Back in September at CppCon 2015 Neil announced that we would be shipping new code analysis tools for C++ that would enforce some of the rules in the C++ Core Guidelines. (A video of the talk is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKlHvAw1z50 and slides are available on the ISOCpp GitHub repo.)

IncludeOS: A C++ Unikernel now free and open source

By Alfred Bratterud | Dec 2, 2015 10:40 AM | Tags: None

The IncludeOS unikernel prototype is now free and open source at GitHub. IncludeOS offers a portable way to run a compiled C++ service directly on virtual x86 hardware; either locally on your Mac or Windows machine with VirtualBox, or in large scale cloud environments running KVM.

#include <os> // literally.

From the home page:

Run your C++ code directly on virtual hardware

IncludeOS aims to be the thinnest, lightest possible layer, between your C++ code and virtual hardware. We provide a bootloader, standard libraries, lots (we hope) of modules, and the build- and deployment system. You provide the service.

IncludeOS is designed for KVM/Linux but previous versions have also been tested successfully on VirtualBox (which again runs on OS X Windows and Linux) and Bochs

It's a prototype -- be patient!

IncludeOS is not production ready -- but we're working hard to become so.

It's a research project

IncludeOS is the result of a research project at Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Science (hioa.no)

A paper titled IncludeOS: a resource efficient unikernel for cloud services, which presents the first prototype, will appear at IEEE CloudCom 2015

Contributors

IncludeOS was created by @alfred-bratterud, with lots of contributions from @fwsgonzo and others at the NETSYS group at HiOA.

Announcing the VS GDB Debugger extension--Marc Goodner

By Adrien Hamelin | Nov 19, 2015 12:46 AM | Tags: advanced

Annoucing a new tool in Visual Studio:

Announcing the VS GDB Debugger extension

by Marc Goodner

From the article:

Earlier this year I wrote a post on how you could debug C++ code on Linux from Visual Studio. It was a bit cumbersome, but it was doable. Today we are releasing the Visual Studio GDB Debugger extension preview. This will enable debugging remote Linux targets including IoT devices...

HPX version 0.9.11 released -- STE||AR Group

By Hartmut Kaiser | Nov 13, 2015 05:32 AM | Tags: performance parallelism experimental distributed computing c++14 c++11

The STE||AR Group has released V0.9.11 of HPX -- A general purpose parallel C++ runtime system for applications of any scale.

HPX V0.9.11 Released

The newest version of HPX (V0.9.11) is now available for download! Please see here for the release notes.

HPX exposes an API fully conforming to the concurrency related parts of the C++11 and C++14 standards, extended and applied to distributed computing.

From the announcement:

• In this release our team has focused on developing higher level C++ programming interfaces which simplify the use of HPX in applications and ensure their portability in terms of code and performance. We paid particular attention to align all of these changes with the existing C++ Standard or with the ongoing standardization work. Other major features include the introduction of executors and various policies which enable customizing the ‘where’ and ‘when’ of task and data placement.
• This release consolidates many of the APIs exposed by HPX. We introduced a new uniform way of creating (local and remote) objects, we added distribution policies allowing to manage and customize data placement and migration, we unified the way various types of parallelism are made available to the user.

Cheerp 1.1 - C++ for the Web with fast startup times, dynamic memory and more speed!--Leaning Tech

By Adrien Hamelin | Nov 7, 2015 05:42 AM | Tags: web intermediate

If you want your C++ code to run on the web, there is Emscripten, but there is also Cheerp:

Cheerp 1.1 - C++ for the Web with fast startup times, dynamic memory and now, more speed!

by Leaning Technologies Ltd.

From the article:

Cheerp is a C++ compiler for the Web platform. Roughly a year ago we released Cheerp 1.0 with the promise of making C++ a first class language for the Web, with full access to DOM and HTML5 APIs (including WebGL) and great performance. At that time, we could only partially meet that promise.

With our early adopters starting to use Cheerp on real world, large scale applications, we were proud to see that Cheerp could indeed be used to seamlessly integrate C++ code into HTML5 apps. But we also realized that the performance of the compiled code was disappointing on real codebases.

As an example, our first benchmarking result on our first large-scale (~1M sloc) customer code was around forty times (40x) slower than native. Not only was this result disappointing, but it also was much worse than what we were expecting based on our internal benchmarks.

One year later, after significant effort focused on performance optimizations, we are here today to announce Cheerp 1.1...

Announcing Visual C++ Build Tools 2015 – standalone C++ tools for build environments--Marian Luparu

By Adrien Hamelin | Nov 4, 2015 03:18 PM | Tags: experimental

You can now compile using Visual C++ without Visual Studio:

Announcing Visual C++ Build Tools 2015 – standalone C++ tools for build environments

by Marian Luparu

From the article:

Together with the availability of Visual Studio 2015 Update 1 RC, we’re also announcing a new way of acquiring the C++ tools: as a standalone installer that only lays down the tools required to build C++ projects without installing the Visual Studio IDE. This new installer is meant to streamline the delivery of the C++ build tools in your build environments and continuous-integration systems.