CppCon 2014 Exception-Safe Code, Part II--Jon Kalb

By Adrien Hamelin | Apr 20, 2015 01:45 PM | Tags: intermediate c++14

While we wait for CppCon 2015 in September, we’re featuring videos of some of the 100+ talks from CppCon 2014. Here is today’s feature:

Exception-Safe Code, Part II

by Jon Kalb

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

Are you 100% confident that your code is exception-safe?

Safe usage of exceptions is a non-trivial problem that the industry has struggled with for the better part of two decades. If you have fear, uncertainty, or doubt about exception safety or just want to see the best practices for using exceptions in C++ and/or C++11/14, this session is for you. We'll start with "What is the problem we are trying to solve?" and discuss alternatives, acknowledge the challenges associated with exception usage, and cover some well-meaning but misguided attempts at safety. I will then present a set of guidelines that are the basis for safe exception usage and solid implementation techniques, including how to transition from an exception-unsafe legacy code base.

When we are finished you will know how to produce code that is easier to write, easier to understand, faster, and 100% robust in the face of exceptions.

CppCon 2014 Exception-Safe Code, Part I--Jon Kalb

By Adrien Hamelin | Apr 17, 2015 08:00 AM | Tags: intermediate c++14

While we wait for CppCon 2015 in September, we’re featuring videos of some of the 100+ talks from CppCon 2014. Here is today’s feature:

Exception-Safe Code, Part I

by Jon Kalb

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

Are you 100% confident that your code is exception-safe?

Safe usage of exceptions is a non-trivial problem that the industry has struggled with for the better part of two decades. If you have fear, uncertainty, or doubt about exception safety or just want to see the best practices for using exceptions in C++ and/or C++11/14, this session is for you. We'll start with "What is the problem we are trying to solve?" and discuss alternatives, acknowledge the challenges associated with exception usage, and cover some well-meaning but misguided attempts at safety. I will then present a set of guidelines that are the basis for safe exception usage and solid implementation techniques, including how to transition from an exception-unsafe legacy code base.

When we are finished you will know how to produce code that is easier to write, easier to understand, faster, and 100% robust in the face of exceptions.

CppCast Episode 8: Biicode and Turbo with Manuel Sanchez

By robwirving | Apr 16, 2015 11:28 PM | Tags: None

Episode 8 of CppCast the only podcast by C++ developers for C++ developers. In this episode Manuel Sanchez joins Rob Irving to talk about Biicode, the C++ dependency manager and Manuel's Template Metaprogramming Library Turbo.

CppCast Episode 8: Biicode and Turbo with Manuel Sanchez

by Rob Irving

About the interviewee:

As a CS undergraduate at the University of Madrid (Spain) and self taught C++ programmer, Manuel Sanchez has been working on personal projects related to Modern C++ during his free time, most of them related to template metaprogramming and his own efforts to give high level features for C++ metaprogramming: The Turbo Metaprogramming Library. Manuel has been working for biicode since September 2014, he assist his fellow biis by dealing with C++ idiosyncrasies while manage very successful posts about template metaprogramming and his work on Turbo.

CppCon 2014 0xBADC0DE--Jens Weller

By Adrien Hamelin | Apr 15, 2015 08:00 AM | Tags: intermediate efficiency

While we wait for CppCon 2015 in September, we’re featuring videos of some of the 100+ talks from CppCon 2014. Here is today’s feature:

0xBADC0DE

by Jens Weller

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

My motivation for this talk is my own expierence as a freelancer and trainer. I have seen a lot of good and bad code in different places. As a freelancer I often had to deal with different, unknown and often large codebases. This talk tries not only to show examples of bad code, but also to analyze why it exists in the first place, and how to deal with it or fix it. I'll visit anti-patterns, but this talk is not about anti-patterns, as that would only spotlight one of the many problems.

Oral History of Bjarne Stroustrup

By Jon Kalb | Apr 13, 2015 01:38 AM | Tags: None

Oral History of Bjarne Stroustrup

About the interview:

In a substantial interview with Paul McJones, Bjarne Stroustrup discusses his youth, his education at the Aarhus University and the University of Cambridge, and his career at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Texas A&M University, and Morgan Stanley. Also covered are his early experience with a variety of programming languages including Simula and BCPL. Finally, the interview focuses on his work on C++ and its predecessor C with Classes, including his goal of combining good abstraction mechanisms with direct access to the hardware. Specific language features discussed include value semantics, templates, concepts, the Standard Template Library, and highlights of the C++11 and C++14 standards.

CppCon 2014 Pragmatic Type Erasure: Solving OOP Problems w/ Elegant Design Pattern--Zach Laine

By Adrien Hamelin | Apr 12, 2015 09:47 AM | Tags: performance efficiency

While we wait for CppCon 2015 in September, we’re featuring videos of some of the 100+ talks from CppCon 2014. Here is today’s feature:

Pragmatic Type Erasure: Solving OOP Problems w/ Elegant Design Pattern

by Zach Laine

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

There are numerous, serious OOP design problems that we have all encountered in production code. These include, among others: - object lifetime/ownership - how to make classes from different class hierarchies conform to a common interface - writing classes that can present multiple interfaces - separating interface and implementation - how to write virtual functions so that subclasses override them properly - the virtual inheritance "diamond of death"

Proper use of type erasure can mitigate, or outright eliminate, these and other problems, without sacrificing performance.

This talk will cover the OOP design problems above and more, and will cover hand-rolled and library-based type erasure approaches that solve those problems. Performance metrics will be provided for the different approaches, and source code will be available after the talk.

CppCon 2014 Embind and Emscripten: Blending C++11, JavaScript, and the Web Browser--Chad Austin

By Adrien Hamelin | Apr 10, 2015 08:00 AM | Tags: c++11

While we wait for CppCon 2015 in September, we’re featuring videos of some of the 100+ talks from CppCon 2014. Here is today’s feature:

Embind and Emscripten: Blending C++11, JavaScript, and the Web Browser

by Chad Austin

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

Emscripten compiles C or C++ source code into JavaScript so it can run in a web browser. Emscripten is commonly used to port games to the web with no download or plugin required.

Embind is a C++11 binding library that makes it easy to expose libraries written in C++ to JavaScript. This allows JavaScript applications to take advantage of existing bodies of C++ code. In addition, C++ compiled into the asm.js subset of JavaScript is often faster than hand-written JavaScript, so Embind makes it convenient to accelerate JavaScript applications by writing high-performance functionality in C++.

With several motivating examples, this lecture will cover the design of embind, how variadic templates and constexpr facilitate interesting optimizations, and how embind minimizes its impact on the size of the generated JavaScript.

CppCast Episode 7: Quick Game Development with Vittorio Romeo -- Rob Irving

By robwirving | Apr 10, 2015 05:12 AM | Tags: None

Episode 7 of CppCast the only podcast by C++ developers for C++ developers. In this episode Vittorio Romeo joins Rob Irving to talk about making simple games with C++ using libraries like SFML, SDL and Cinder.

CppCast Episode 7: Quick Game Development with Vittorio Romeo

by Rob Irving

About the interviewee:

Vittorio Romeo is an undergraduate Computer Science student at "Università degli Studi di Messina". Since childhood he has always been interested in programming, and learned to develop applications and games as an autodidact. After discovering C++ a few years ago, Vittorio became extremely passionate about its evolution and its community. He currently works on open-source general-purpose C++14 libraries and develops free open-source games. Vittorio also loves teaching: he manages a well-received C++11/C++14 video tutorial series and he talked about game development in C++ at CppCon 2014. When he's not in front of a computer, Vittorio enjoys fitness activities (weightlifting, swimming, running) and reading.

CppCon 2014 Introduction to C++ AMP (GPGPU Computing)--Marc Gregoire

By Adrien Hamelin | Apr 8, 2015 08:00 AM | Tags: performance

While we wait for CppCon 2015 in September, we’re featuring videos of some of the 100+ talks from CppCon 2014. Here is today’s feature:

Introduction to C++ AMP (GPGPU Computing)

by Marc Gregoire

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

Meet C++ AMP (Accelerated Massive Parallelism), an abstraction layer on top of accelerators such as GPUs. In its current version it allows you to run code on any DX11 GPU, independent of the vendor, and it will even distribute workload across GPUs of different vendors simultaneously. C++ AMP was originally designed by Microsoft but is now an open standard. C++ AMP can deliver orders of magnitude performance increase with certain algorithms by utilizing the GPU to perform mathematical calculations. This talk will give a high level overview of what C++ AMP is and what it can do for you. It is time to start taking advantage of the computing power of GPUs!

CppCon 2014 Rebuilding Boost Date-Time for C++11--Jeff Garland

By Adrien Hamelin | Apr 6, 2015 06:07 AM | Tags: c++11 boost

While we wait for CppCon 2015 in September, we’re featuring videos of some of the 100+ talks from CppCon 2014. Here is today’s feature:

Rebuilding Boost Date-Time for C++11

by Jeff Garland

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

Boost date_time is a widely used C++ library originally released in 2001 -- including being the basis for elements of the chrono library in c++11. While the library interface has stayed stable for more than a decade, the world around it has changed with the standard library and language changing. It is time for the library tobe rewritten to account for c++11.

The lecture describes in detail the design decisions and changes to the library for C++11. More generally it describes elements of design for a small valuetype library. Many of these considerations involve new features of C++11 and how they should be used. This includes noexcept, move construction/assignment (R-values), constexpr, enum classes, and user defined literals.