CppCon 2015 Program Highlights, 5 of N

The CppCon 2015 conference program has been posted for the upcoming September conference. We’ve received requests that the program continue to be posted in “bite-sized” posts, a few sessions at a time, to make the 100+ sessions easier to absorb, so here is another set of talks. This series of posts will conclude once the entire conference program has been posted in this way.

 

The C++ language would be far less useful without its tools. The good compilers, the dependancy managers,...

The following interrelated CppCon 2015 talks tackle these issues and more.

In this post:

  • Cross-Platform Mobile App Development with Visual C++ 2015
  • Doxygen to DoxyPress : A Journey from C++98 to C++11
  • Beyond Sanitizers
  • What's New in Visual C++ 2015 and Future Directions
  • CLANG + C2 - Engineering/Futures/Measurements

 

Cross-Platform Mobile App Development with Visual C++ 2015 by Marc Gregoire, Software Architect, Nikon Metrology

Visual C++ 2015 supports the development of apps for the Windows platform as well as for Android and iOS. A single code base, possibly with a thin platform-specific UI layer, can be compiled to run on Windows, Android, and iOS. The resulting binary can be published to a device and debugged, all from within Visual C++ 2015. This presentation introduces you to such cross-platform mobile app development, including debugging and emulation, and includes a number of demos.


Doxygen to DoxyPress : A Journey from C++98 to C++11 by Barbara Geller and Ansel Sermersheim, Co-Founders, CopperSpice

This presentation will discuss the benefits of using a documentation generator for creating internal code documentation or end user documentation.  DoxyPress can be used to document your source code, generate API documentation, show class hierarchies, collaboration diagrams, and much more. DoxyPress supports several output formats including html, chm, latex, and man pages.

As part of our talk we will cover the process of redesigning source code originally designed for C++98 and how to migrate it to C++11. We will talk about the advantages and drawbacks of moving to C++11 and show how the code changed in DoxyPress.

We will show a small demonstration of DoxyPressApp, which is a a GUI program used to set up your project file which is then used by DoxyPress to generate documentation.

DoxyPress is a fork of the Doxygen documentation tool. A very basic understanding of C++ will be helpful. No prior knowledge of DoxyPress or Doxygen is required.


Beyond Sanitizers by Kostya Serebryany, Software Engineer, Google

At CppCon’2014 we presented the Sanitizers, a family of dynamic testing tools for C++. These tools allow you to find many stability and security bugs in C++ code, but they are only as good as your tests are. In this talk we will show how to improve your tests with guided fuzzing and how to protect your applications in production even if some bugs were not found. Fuzzing, or fuzz testing, is a surprisingly effective technique that allows you to discover new interesting test inputs. Coverage-guided fuzzing uses coverage-like code instrumentation to make fuzzing orders of magnitude more efficient. Taint-guided fuzzing goes even further by using taint tracking techniques. The next line of defense may be incorporated directly into production: the Control Flow Integrity instrumentation allows you to protect your program from corrupted function pointers (including pointers to virtual tables) and separating stack variables from the call stack protects from corrupted return addresses -- both with near-zero overhead. We will concentrate on particular tools implemented in the opensource LLVM toolchain (libFuzzer, DataFlowSanitizer, -fsanitize=cfi,safe_stack), but will also discuss several alternatives.


What's New in Visual C++ 2015 and Future Directions by Steve Carroll and Ayman Shoukry

In this talk, we'll discuss new features, optimizations, and scenarios in Visual Studio 2015. We'll cover new backend optimizations, improved build throughput, new productivity and diagnostics features, and give a detailed update on our conformance progress, as well as talk about cool new c++1y features that we are shipping from await to modules.

Visual Studio isn't just for Microsoft platform developers. We'll also demonstrate our latest cross platform C++ development features for Android and iOS. We'll also give a sneak peak at our work on combining the Clang frontend with our existing backend to bring Clang support for Windows to Visual Studio.


CLANG + C2 - Engineering/Futures/Measurements by James Radigan

The talk will cover the CLANG + c2.dll compiler for the Microsoft platform. It will contain parts of the talk given at //Build 2015 that can be found on line: "Compiling Objective-C Using the Visual Studio 2015 C++ Code Generation that Builds Windows, SQL, .Net, and Office". The focus this time will be on C++.

The talk will disclose the architecture of how we tied the CLANG open source front end with the Microsoft optimizing backends (several configurations are needed) and how far we are from providing a CTP for public consumption targeting 4 different architectures. Included in this section will be a disclosure of data on compile time, memory consumption, conformance and correctness.

In addition the talk will cover the nuts and bolts of several key innovative compiler and runtime technologies we will be delivering in the Visual Studio 2015 updates (Fall, Winter and Spring). New investments in the compiler and runtime space include: Improved optimization and auto-vectorization, more secure code generation, incremental whole program compilation, and new asynchronous C++ code generation.

Webinar Recording: A Tour of Modern C++

The recording of our July 2nd webinar, A Tour of Modern C++, is now available.

Webinar recording

by Anastasia Kazakova

In this webinar, Dmitri Nesteruk shows the latest language additions introduced in C++11 and also talks a little bit about some of the forthcoming features in C++14 and 17.

Demo project can be found on GitHub.

Agenda:

  • 01:02 - Uniform initialization, initializer lists.
  • 09:47 - Auto & decltype.
  • 17:42 - Override & final.
  • 22:03 - Lambdas.
  • 28:10 - Strongly typed enumerations.
  • 30:43 - Range-based 'for' loops.
  • 34:05 - Static asserts.
  • 37:33 - Type traits.
  • 38:53 - Variadic templates.
  • 45:04 - Smart pointers.
  • 54:47 - rvalue references.
  • 01:01:08 - Q&A session.

 

Listen to the recording and read the answers to some of the questions asked during the webinar in our blog post.

Easier To Use, And More Expressive--Tony DaSilva

Here is some reasonning of the new standard:

Easier To Use, And More Expressive

by Tony DaSilva

From the article:

One of the goals for each evolutionary increment in C++ is to decrease the probability of an average programmer from making mistakes by supplanting “old style” features/idioms with new, easier to use, and more expressive alternatives. The following code sample attempts to show an example of this evolution from C++98/03 to C++11 to C++14...

CppCast Episode 23: Game Dev and Low Latency with Nicolas Guillemot

Episode 23 of CppCast the only podcast for C++ developers by C++ devlopers. In this episode Rob and Jason are joined by Nicolas Guillemot to discuss the ongoing work of the GameDev and Low Latency C++ Study Group.

CppCast Episode 23: Game Dev and Low Latency with Nicolas Guillemot

by Rob Irving and Jason Turner

About the interviewee:

Nicolas Guillemot started studying C++ and OpenGL to make games, and fell in love with them. He enjoys participating in game jams, and has had the opportunity to work in some game development studios: Inlight Entertainment, and Electronic Arts. He is currently taking a break from finishing a bachelor's in software engineering to work at Intel, doing mostly graphics-related work to help game developers take advantage of Intel GPU features.

CppCon 2015 Program Highlights, 4 of N

The CppCon 2015 conference program has been posted for the upcoming September conference. We’ve received requests that the program continue to be posted in “bite-sized” posts, a few sessions at a time, to make the 100+ sessions easier to absorb, so here is another set of talks. This series of posts will conclude once the entire conference program has been posted in this way.

 

The C++ possess another language inside it: the template language. It is useful for a lot of things, from writting less code to compile time computations or checks, but can lengthen compile time too. To master it is not easy.

The following interrelated CppCon 2015 talks tackle these issues and more (part 2).

In this post:

  • Compile-time tools supporting generic programming in C++
  • C++ metaprogramming: a paradigm shift
  • Pruning Error Messages From Your C++ Template Code
  • C++ Metaprogramming: Journey from simple to insanity and back
  • boo{stache} exposed : the inner-workings of a generic template engine

 

Compile-time tools supporting generic programming in C++

Generic programming is a programming paradigm which makes it possible to build highly extensible and efficient libraries. In C++ it can be implemented using templates, therefore developers and users of generic libraries need to understand how the compiler works with templates. The details are important when the code using a library instantiates different templates (or specialisations), or the same templates but with different arguments as expected. Fixing such bugs can lead to difficult debugging sessions. These are not bugs in the program's runtime behaviour. These are bugs in the program's compile-time behaviour and therefore different tools are needed to find them. Tools providing insight into what happens during the compilation process are needed.

Template metaprogrammers have been pushing the limits of what is possible using templates. The way they use templates is usually more complex than what generic libraries need. Recently a number of advanced tools supporting template metaprogrammers have been built. REPL shells, debuggers, profilers are available to make it possible to see what happens during compilation.

This talk presents how these tools can be used and be useful for the developers and users of generic libraries. Insight into what happens inside the compiler can be extremely useful to understand why the code compiles slowly, behaves the way it does or to debug errors in code using generic libraries.


C++ metaprogramming: a paradigm shift

Most people think metaprogramming is hard. It isn't; we just didn't have the right tools for it. This talk will present a new way of metaprogramming using the same syntax as that of normal C++. It will show how the runtime and the compile-time boundaries can be crossed almost seamlessly. It will show how compilation times can be reduced without sacrificing expressiveness. It will introduce Hana [1], a newly accepted Boost library using cutting edge features of the language in a creative way to solve the problem of metaprogramming for good.

[1]: http://github.com/ldionne/hana


Pruning Error Messages From Your C++ Template Code

Many template libraries are regarded with ambivalent feelings by developers: On the one hand, such libraries can offer wonderful functionality. On the other hand, they are dreaded for the sheer amount of error messages spilled out by the compiler when there is even a small bug in the developer's code. This talk will demonstrate several techniques to drastically reduce the amount of compiler output in case of errors (with real-life examples, of course).


C++ Metaprogramming: Journey from simple to insanity and back

Part I: Introduction to template metaprogramming. Template metaprogramming is a variant of generic programming, a technique that uses C++ template mechanism to perform computations at compilation time, usually to generate, from a single description, executable code that depends on the properties of the data types. It can be viewed as “programming with types”. In this example-driven class we start with the overview of the metaprogramming tools (everything you wanted to know about template specializations but were afraid to ask). We will apply these tools to simple examples, such as: how to sort a sequence in order of increasing values, unless it’s a sequence of pointers, in which case we want the values of what they point to. Part II: Advanced techniques and practical applications. Simple examples of metaprogramming are fun and useful, but once you master them you start chafing at the limitations. This is C++, where we don’t suffer limitations gladly. We therefore move on to the more advanced techniques, including SFINAE, and the appropriately more advanced examples. The journey takes us back to the beginning: after all, when sorting a sequence of values vs a sequence of pointers, you don’t really care whether the pointer is smart or dumb. What you really want to know is whether “*p” compiles or not. What you really need is an “if_compiles” metaprogramming function.


boo{stache} exposed : the inner-workings of a generic template engine

Template engines are commonly found generating web pages, customer reports, or even source code. They take a source template and data model as input and generate some desired output.

Boostache was started as the Library in a Week challenge from CppNow'14 with initial support for Mustache.

Today Boostache supports multiple template formats and adapts automagically at compile time to user defined data models. Many of the techniques utilized in Boostache are the same that Ciere has employed in custom IDL compilers, Domain Specific Language systems, compilers, and runtimes.

This talk will briefly introduce Boostache and then delve into the internal architecture and design of the library. We will explore some implementation details of the parser, compiler, virtual machine, and generic data model infrastructure with the goal to expose useful techniques and patterns from this C++11 code base that can be used in your own libraries and applications.

Messaging and signaling in C++

The 7th part of my series on writing applications in C++ using Qt and boost:

Messaging and Signaling in C++

by Jens Weller

From the article:

This time it is about how to notify one part of our application that something has happened somewhere else. I will start with Qt, as it brings with signals and slots a mechanism to do exactly that. But, as I have the goal not to use Qt mainly in the UI Layer, I will also look on how to notify other parts of the application, when things are changing.

CppCon 2015 hotels filling up

cppcon-031.PNGIf you're registered for CppCon (or going to be), make sure you book your hotel soon. If you leave booking till the week before the conference it's likely you'll have to stay someplace a few miles away because downtown Bellevue is a popular spot in September and all hotels within reasonable walking distance of CppCon are expected to be fully booked by the time of the event.

Last year's CppCon was well attended, and registration is stronger this year. Three of the four CppCon hotel room blocks are now sold out. The final CppCon negotiated room rate block expires on Monday at noon PST.

The announcement:

Hotel Room Shortage Predicted

Book Now!

Our contacts at the official conference hotels are predicting that, like last year, all hotel rooms in Bellevue will be booked.

Currently three of our four hotel blocks are full. The Marriott still has some rooms that we’ve reserved for attendees. Originally they had agreed to hold these rooms (at a conference discounted rate) until this Friday, but they’ve agree to extend the deadline to Monday (August 24th) at noon (west coast time).

We strongly encourage anyone planning to attend this year’s conference to book your room right away.