CppCon 2014 Another fundamental shift in Parallelism Paradigm?--Michael Wong

By Adrien Hamelin | Apr 29, 2015 08:00 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:

Another fundamental shift in Parallelism Paradigm?

by Michael Wong

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

Another fundamental shift in Parallelism Paradigm? Sure. When was the last time you heard that before?

But seriously, as the number of threads/cores continue to increase, there is a growing pressure on applications to exploit more of the available parallelism in their codes, including coarse-, medium-, and fine-grain parallelism. OpenMP has been one of the dominant shared-memory programming models but is evolving beyond that with a new Mission Statement (no, really!) making it well suited for exploiting medium- and fine-grained parallelism.

OpenMP 4.0 exhibits many of these features to support the next step in both consumer, high-performance and exascale computing, with one of the world's first programming model for high-level language support for GPU/Accelerators and vector SIMD across not 1 but 3 high-level languages: C++, C, and that language whose name we dare not speak, but starts with F.

CppCon 2014 Lock-free by Example--Tony Van Eerd

By Adrien Hamelin | Apr 27, 2015 08:00 AM | Tags: efficiency advanced

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:

Lock-free by Example

by Tony Van Eerd

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

Dive into and follow along making a lock-free queue.

In particular, a multi-producer, multi-consumer, growing, shrinking, mostly contiguous, lock-free circular queue.

With this single (complicated!) example, we will come across, and attempt to solve, many of the typical problems found in lockfree programming, and delve into the pros and cons of various solutions to those problems.

CppCon 2014 STL Features And Implementation Techniques--Stephan Lavavej

By Adrien Hamelin | Apr 24, 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:

STL Features And Implementation Techniques

by Stephan Lavavej

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

This session will cover selected STL features from C++11/14, both explaining how to use them and delving into implementation techniques that could be useful outside the STL.

I will avoid covering popular features you're already using (e.g. make_shared, make_unique) and obscure features of limited use (e.g. forward_list). The focus will be on useful but underappreciated features like dual-range algorithms, minimal allocators, and heterogeneous associative lookup.

CppCast Episode 9: Asynchronous Programming with Hartmut Kaiser

By robwirving | Apr 24, 2015 12:13 AM | Tags: performance efficiency

Episode 9 of CppCast the only podcast by C++ developers for C++ developers. In this episode Rob and Jason are joined by Hartmut Kaiser to talk about Asynchronous Program and the HPX framework.

CppCast Episode 9: Asynchronous Programming with Hartmut Kaiser

by Rob Irving and Jason Turner

About the interviewee:

Hartmut Kaiser is an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Louisiana State University. At the same time, he holds the position of a senior scientist at the Center for Computation and Technology at LSU. He received his doctorate from the Technical University of Chemnitz (Germany) in 1988. He is probably best known through his involvement in open source software projects, mainly as the author of several C++ libraries he has contributed to Boost, which are in use by thousands of developers worldwide. He is a voting member of the ISO C++ Standards Committee and his current research is focused on leading the STE||AR group at CCT working on the practical design and implementation of the ParalleX execution model and related programming methods. In addition, he architected and developed the core library modules of SAGA for C++, a Simple API for Grid Applications.

CppCon 2014 Exception-Safe Code, Part III—Jon Kalb

By Adrien Hamelin | Apr 22, 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 III

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 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.