CppCon 2019: Writing Safety Critical Automotive C++ Software for AI Hardware--Michael Wong

This year, CppCon 2020 is going virtual. The dates are still the same – September 14-18 – and we are aiming for the CppCon live event to have pretty much everything you’re familiar with at CppCon except moved online: multiple tracks including “back to basics” and a new “embedded” track; live speaker Q&A; live talk time zones friendly to Americas and EMEA (and we’re going to try to arrange around-the-clock recorded repeats in all time zones, where speakers who are available can be available for live Q&A in their repeated talks too, and we’ll do that if it’s possible – but we’re still working on it!); virtual tables where you can interact face-to-face online with other attendees just like at the physical event; virtual exhibitor spaces where you can meet the folks on your favorite product’s teams to ask them question face-to-face; pre- and post-conference classes; and even the CppCon house band playing live before every plenary session. All talk recordings will be freely available as usual on YouTube a month or two after the event, but everything else above will be available only live during CppCon week.

To whet your appetite for this year’s conference, here’s another of the top-rated talks from last year. Enjoy – and register today for CppCon 2020 – all the spirit and flavor of CppCon, this year all virtual and online!

Writing Safety Critical Automotive C++ Software for High Performance AI Hardware

by Michael Wong

Summary of the talk:

How can we make C++ in a Safe and secure way?
It is about time we talk about what it takes to create safe software, especially for automotive. This talk is about the practical engineering challenges of turning deep learning, classical machine vision and sensor fusion algorithms from research prototypes into real-world automotive-grade systems. We will summarize the many safety critical standards in general for C++ and specifically for autonomous vehicles (AV). These include the updates to MISRA, AUTOSAR, and our own SG12 which has been processing updates from WG23 for C++. We have been working hard in these standards bodies and with industrial partners to deliver automotive-grade, safe, high performance AI software development tools.
We will further review C++ Directions that supports this and reveal the road map for what is possibly the earliest Safety Critical C++ that is also capable of heterogeneous dispatch for AV.

CppCon 2020 Back to Basics Track--Arthur O'Dwyer

Will you attend?

CppCon 2020 Back to Basics Track

by Arthur O'Dwyer

From the article:

In 2020, as in 2019, CppCon will have a Back to Basics Track. This track’s mission is to cover all the essentials of modern C++. Each session in the track is about a single concrete topic, often expressible in just one or two words: Templates. Exception-safety. Move semantics. Our goal is to fit these sessions together like jigsaw pieces to produce a track that covers “everything you need to know” to be a working programmer in today’s C++ community...

CppCon 2019: Floating-Point <charconv>: Making Your Code 10x Faster With C++17's Final Boss--STL

This year, CppCon 2020 is going virtual. The dates are still the same – September 14-18 – and we are aiming for the CppCon live event to have pretty much everything you’re familiar with at CppCon except moved online: multiple tracks including “back to basics” and a new “embedded” track; live speaker Q&A; live talk time zones friendly to Americas and EMEA (and we’re going to try to arrange around-the-clock recorded repeats in all time zones, where speakers who are available can be available for live Q&A in their repeated talks too, and we’ll do that if it’s possible – but we’re still working on it!); virtual tables where you can interact face-to-face online with other attendees just like at the physical event; virtual exhibitor spaces where you can meet the folks on your favorite product’s teams to ask them question face-to-face; pre- and post-conference classes; and even the CppCon house band playing live before every plenary session. All talk recordings will be freely available as usual on YouTube a month or two after the event, but everything else above will be available only live during CppCon week.

To whet your appetite for this year’s conference, here’s another of the top-rated talks from last year. Enjoy – and register today for CppCon 2020 – all the spirit and flavor of CppCon, this year all virtual and online!

Floating-Point <charconv>: Making Your Code 10x Faster With C++17's Final Boss

by Stephan T. Lavavej

Summary of the talk:

Floating-point numbers are ancient, mysterious, and terrifying. Over the past 30 years, the C and C++ Standards have provided many functions for floating-point/string conversions, such as C's strtof(), strtod(), and printf() %a %e %f %g, and C++'s iostreams, stof(), stod(), and to_string(). Despite this history, floating-point is far from a solved problem - these functions have ranged from annoyingly to egregiously slow, and application developers and library maintainers alike have found it exceedingly difficult to understand floating-point behavior.

This session will present new and wondrous developments in the area of floating-point conversions. If your serialization code is bottlenecked by floating-point printing, this will accelerate your code by roughly 3x to 30x (yes, times, not percent). You can also improve the human-readability of your output. Along the way, this session will cover the basics of floating-point representations, dispelling common myths like fuzziness and non-determinism.

Specifically, C++17 added 3 pages of Standardese describing the charconv header and its functions from_chars() and to_chars(). This feature has required an unexpectedly large amount of implementation work, taking over a dev-year for MSVC and becoming the last C++17 library feature to ship. Coincidentally, Ulf Adams at Google developed a novel algorithm named Ryu, which is responsible for the amazing speed of to_chars(). This session will focus on how to use charconv and how to understand its many supported formats, with a brief overview of Ryu's techniques.

My Updated Course is Live! C++ for Beginners--Kate Gregory

Interested?

My Updated Course is Live! C++ for Beginners

by Kate Gregory

From the article:

At the start of the lockdown, Pluralsight made its huge curriculum free to help those who were suddenly needing new skills to find a new job during the pandemic. I saw a huge number of views of my C++ course for those who don't already know how to program. It was ironic, because I was busy updating that course, a process that is finally complete...

ReSharper C++ 2020.2: Unreal Engine Project Model, Improved C++/CLI Support, and More

ReSharper C++ 2020.2 is released!

ReSharper C++ 2020.2: Unreal Engine Project Model, Improved C++/CLI Support, and More

by Elvira Mustafina

From the article:

  • Unreal Engine: support for the Unreal Engine project model, better conformance to the Unreal Engine coding standard, and new inspections.
  • C++/CLI: improved interoperability between C++/CLI and C#, extended navigation and search features, and inspections for C++/CLI-specific keywords.
  • Code analysis: preview for Clang-Tidy fixes, improved support for constexpr functions, and highlighting for misspelled preprocessor directives.
  • Code completion: auto-generated lambda argument for std::function, and import completion can now add forward class declarations.
  • Navigation and search: Go to declaration for unresolved identifiers, hidden preprocessor directives in File Structure, and faster Find Usages.
  • Code style and formatting: new settings for multiline ternary, single-line style comments, and sorting of include directives.
  • File templates: new Source file and Header file templates.

CppCon 2019: Mesh: Automatically Compacting Your C++ Application's Memory--Emery Berger

This year, CppCon 2020 is going virtual. The dates are still the same – September 14-18 – and we are aiming for the CppCon live event to have pretty much everything you’re familiar with at CppCon except moved online: multiple tracks including “back to basics” and a new “embedded” track; live speaker Q&A; live talk time zones friendly to Americas and EMEA (and we’re going to try to arrange around-the-clock recorded repeats in all time zones, where speakers who are available can be available for live Q&A in their repeated talks too, and we’ll do that if it’s possible – but we’re still working on it!); virtual tables where you can interact face-to-face online with other attendees just like at the physical event; virtual exhibitor spaces where you can meet the folks on your favorite product’s teams to ask them question face-to-face; pre- and post-conference classes; and even the CppCon house band playing live before every plenary session. All talk recordings will be freely available as usual on YouTube a month or two after the event, but everything else above will be available only live during CppCon week.

To whet your appetite for this year’s conference, here’s another of the top-rated talks from last year. Enjoy – and register today for CppCon 2020 – all the spirit and flavor of CppCon, this year all virtual and online!

Mesh: Automatically Compacting Your C++ Application's Memory

by Emery Berger

Summary of the talk:

Programs written in C++ can suffer from serious memory fragmentation, leading to low utilization of memory, degraded performance, and application failure due to memory exhaustion. This talk introduces Mesh, a plug-in replacement for malloc that, for the first time, eliminates fragmentation in unmodified C++ applications through compaction. A key challenge is that, unlike in garbage-collected environments, the addresses of allocated objects in C++ are directly exposed to programmers, and applications may do things like stash addresses in integers, and store flags in the low bits of aligned addresses. This hostile environment makes it impossible to safely relocate objects, as the runtime cannot precisely locate and update pointers. Mesh combines novel randomized algorithms with widely-supported virtual memory operations to provably reduce fragmentation, breaking long-established worst-case bounds on memory efficiency with high probability. Mesh generally matches the runtime performance of state-of-the art memory allocators while reducing memory consumption and eliminating pathological cases; in particular, Mesh reduces the memory of consumption of Firefox by 16% and Redis by 39%. There are efforts underway to incorporate Mesh's approach to eliminate fragmentation into existing allocators like tcmalloc and jemalloc; Mesh itself is available at https://github.com/plasma-umass/Mesh, and it can be used just by setting an environment variable.

C++ Lambda Week: Going Generic--Bartlomiej Filipek

The series continue.

C++ Lambda Week: Going Generic

by Bartlomiej Filipek

From the article:

We’re in the third day of the lambda week. So far, you’ve learned basic syntax and how to capture things. Another important aspect is that lambdas can also be used in the “generic” scenarios. This is especially possible since C++14 where we got generic lambdas (auto arguments), and then in C++20, you can even specify a template lambda!