Higher Level C++ with the Boost Libraries -- Dave Abrahams

By Blog Staff | Nov 7, 2012 06:46 PM | Tags: advanced

Higher-Level C++ with the Boost Libraries

Dave Abrahams, BoostPro Computing

Contact [email protected] for further details

The Boost library collection has become the de-facto standard toolkit for serious C++ development projects.

What You'll Get: new tools, revolutionary ideas, and a foundation upon which to continue expanding their knowledge.

Who It’s For: C++ developers who want to accelerate their work using high-quality infrastructure.

Format: Each day is divided roughly into four blocks, each consisting of an hour of lecture and thirty minutes of hands-on exercises. Ideally presented as a 5-day course, it is scalable to 3 days based on your team’s needs.

Structure: the scope of Boost is broad, so it is important to cover a subset of the collection that is both useful and relevant to your team. We will customize a selection of course modules that address your group’s needs, experience, and short- and long-term needs.

Suggested Course Modules

The modules below represent some suggested groupings of similar/related libraries, based on size, domain, and utility. Some libraries don’t fit neatly into one particular module, and the list of Boost libraries is constantly growing, so be sure to let us know if you want something you can't find here.

• The Boost Core: presents a broad array of generally-useful libraries and introduces “vocabulary components and idioms” that are used throughout other libraries in Boost and in the C++11 standard. Recommended for all presentations of this course.
• The Boost Graph Library: concepts, algorithms, data structures, theory and practice.
• Computational Geometry with Boost: covers Boost.Geometry and Boost.Polygon.
• Networking and Async Services: showcases Boost.ASIO and gets inside the “network programming head-space,” showing design patterns that can make this kind of code tight, maintainable, and efficient.
• Boost Concurrency and HPC: covers both the issues inherent in concurrent systems and a suite of libraries in Boost that can help you solve them.
• Algebraic Data Types: describes a highly-generic and introspectable way of working with data using the Boost Tuple, Variant, Optional, and Fusion libraries.
• Image Processing: covers the powerful Boost.GIL library
• Testing and Correctness: discover the Boost tools for writing rock solid code. Shows how to manage uncertainty and makes it possible to code with confidence.
• Boost for Numerical Computing: covers the Boost.Math, Boost.Interval, Boost.Random, Boost.Accumulators and more, including several important offerings outside the Boost collection.
• Functional Programming: aimed at C++03 programmers (who don’t have true lambda expressions) and at C++11 programmers desiring more power to create and manipulate functions.
• Thinking Hybrid with Boost.Python: covers everything needed to flow smoothly between Python and C++, small- and large-scale development, extending Python, and embedding it in C++ programs.
• Text Processing with Boost: develop fluency with the vocabulary of Boost's many text processing libraries and learn how to apply them effectively.
• Metaprogramming Concepts and Frameworks: 
A compressed, high-intensity subset of our 5-day metaprogramming course, covering Boost.MPL, Boost.Fusion, and Boost.Proto, among others.

An Overview of the New C++ (C++11) -- Scott Meyers

By Blog Staff | Oct 27, 2012 05:51 PM | Tags: intermediate

An Overview of the New C++ (C++11)

Scott Meyers

Specification of the new version of C++ (“C++11”) is finally complete, and many compilers already offer a wealth of features from the revised language. And such features! auto-declared variables reduce typing drudgery and syntactic noise; Unicode, threading support, and alignment control address important functionality gaps; and rvalue references and variadic templates facilitate the creation of more efficient, more flexible libraries. The standard library gains resource-managing smart pointers, new containers, additional algorithms, support for regular expressions, and more. Altogether, C++11 offers much more than “old” C++. This intensively technical seminar introduces the most important new features in C++11 and explains how to get the most out of them.

Course Highlights

Participants will gain:

• Knowledge of the most important C++11 features and how they help produce better programs.
• Insights into how new features solve important problems.
• Understanding of which features are useful primarily to library writers, which to class authors, and which to virtually all C++ developers.
• Availability information regarding which features are available on which platforms.

Who Should Attend

Designers and developers who are using, considering using, or wish to know about the expanded capabilities of C++11. Attendees should be experienced with C++ and comfortable with its primary features (e.g., classes, templates, inheritance, STL, etc.). Familiarity with threading concepts (e.g., threads and mutexes) is helpful, but is not essential.

Format

Lecture and question/answer. There are no hands-on exercises, but participants are welcome – encouraged! – to bring computers to experiment with the material as it is presented.

Length

Three full days (six to seven lecture hours per day).

Detailed Topic Outline

The History and Vocabulary of C++ Evolution

Sample Program: C++98 vs. C++11

Features for Everybody:

• auto for Type Declarations
• Range-Based for Loops
• “>>” as Nested Template Closer
• nullptr
• Enhanced enums
• Unicode characters and strings
• Raw string literals
• Uniform initialization syntax
• Initializer lists
• Lambda Expressions
• Template Aliases
• Threading Support
• New Container Features
• Smart Pointers (shared_ptr, weak_ptr, unique_ptr)
• Hash Tables
• Singly-Linked Lists
• Fixed-Size Arrays
• Tuples
• Regular Expressions
• Generalized Functors(function)
• Generalized Binder (bind)
• New Algorithms
• Other New Library Functionality

Features Primarily for Class Authors: ◦Move Support, Rvalue References, and Perfect Forwarding

• default Member Functions
• delete Functions
• Default Member Initialization
• Delegating Constructors
• Inheriting Constructors

Features Primarily for Library Authors: ◦Static Assertions

• explicit Conversion Functions
• Variadic Templates
• decltype
• Alignment control (i.e., alignof, alignas, etc.)

Yet More Features (Overview)

Removed and Deprecated Features (Overview)

Sources for Further Information

Fastware for C++--Scott Meyers

By Blog Staff | Oct 27, 2012 05:41 PM | Tags: intermediate

Fastware for C++

Scott Meyers

Fastware is software that's fast — that gets the job done quickly. Low latency is the name of the game, and achieving it calls for insights from software engineering, computer science, and the effective use of C++. This presentation addresses crucial issues in each of these areas, covering topics as diverse as CPU caches, speed-sensitive use of the STL, data structures supporting concurrency, profile-guided optimization, and more.

Much of the material in "Fastware for C++" is unique to this seminar, i.e., unavailable in Scott's publications or his other training courses. However, as the successor to Scott's acclaimed "High-Performance C++ Programming" seminar, "Fastware for C++" also includes updated discussions of topics from that course as well as from Scott's books, Effective C++, More Effective C++, and Effective STL.

Course Highlights

Participants will gain:

• Recognition of the importance and implications of treating performance as a correctness criterion.
• Understanding of how effective use of third-party APIs can improve system performance.
• Knowledge of specific C++ practices that improve the speed of both the language and the STL.
• Familiarity with concurrent data structures and algorithms poised to become de facto standards.

Who Should Attend

Systems designers, programmers, and technical managers involved in the design, implementation, and maintenance of performance-sensitive libraries and applications using C++. Participants should already know the basic features of C++ (e.g., classes, inheritance, virtual functions, templates), but expertise is not required. Knowledge of common threading constructs (e.g., threads, mutexes, condition variables, etc.) is helpful. People who have learned C++ recently, as well as people who have been programming in C++ for many years, will come away from this seminar with useful, practical, proven information.

Format

Lecture and question/answer. There are no hands-on exercises, but participants are welcome — encouraged! — to bring computers to experiment with the material as it is presented.

Length

Two full days (six to seven lecture hours per day).

Detailed Topic Outline

Treating speed as a correctness criterion.

• Why "first make it right, then make it fast" is misguided.
• Latency, initial and total.
• Other performance measures.
• Designing for speed.

Optimizing systems versus optimizing programs. ◦Most system components are "foreign."

• Exercising indirect control over "foreign" components.
• Examples.

CPU Caches and why they're important. ◦Data caches, instruction caches, TLBs.

• Cache hierarchies, cache lines, prefetching, and traversal orders.
• Cache coherency and false sharing.
• Cache associativity.
• Guidelines for effective cache usage.

Optimizing C++ usage: ◦Move semantics.

• Avoiding unnecessary object creations.
• When custom heap management can make sense.

Optimizing STL usage: ◦reserve and shrink_to_fit.

• Range member functions.
• Using function objects instead of function pointers.
• Using sorted vectors instead of associative containers.
• A comparison of STL sorting-related algorithms.

An overview of concurrent data structures. ◦Meaning of "concurrent data structure."

• Use cases.
• Common offerings in TBB and PPL.
• Writing your own.

An overview of concurrent STL-like algorithms. ◦Thread management and exception-related issues.

• Common offerings in TBB and PPL.
• OpenMP.
• Other TBB and PPL offerings.

Exploiting "free" concurrency.

• Meaning of "free."
• Multiple-approach problem solving.
• Speculative execution.

Making use of PGO (profile-guided optimization) and WPO (whole-program optimization).

Resources for further information.

For more information on this course, contact Scott directly.