CppCon 2014 Accept No Visitors--Yuriy Solodkyy

By Adrien Hamelin | Mar 13, 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:

Accept No Visitors

by Yuriy Solodkyy

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

Visitor Design Pattern was an attempt to overcome a limitation of object-oriented languages - inability to retroactively introduce new polymorphic functions. While it was quite efficient in providing extensibility of functions, it was never truly retroactive, easy to teach, use or maintain, and it achieved this at the cost of hindering extensibility of classes, introduction of control inversion and requiring tons of boilerplate code to be written. Visitor Design Pattern is a workaround, not a solution to the problem and in this talk I would like to discuss a more elegant yet as efficient solution in the form of a Match statement. We will look at several use-cases for the Visitor Design Pattern, their encoding using both approaches and ultimately their advantages and disadvantages.

CppCast Episode 3: Cross Platform Mobile C++ in Visual Studio with Ankit Asthana -- Rob Irving

By robwirving | Mar 13, 2015 05:47 AM | Tags: None

Episode 3 of CppCast, the only podcast by C++ developers for C++ developers. In this episode Ankit Asthana joins Rob Irving to talk about the new features in Visual Studio 2015 that enable C++ developers to build and debug Android applications from Microsoft's popular IDE.

CppCast Episode 3: Cross Platform Mobile C++ in Visual Studio with Ankit Asthana

by Rob Irving

About the interviewee:

Ankit Asthana is a program manager working in the Visual C++ Cross-Platform space. He is knowledgeable in cross-platform technologies, compilers (dynamic and static compilation, optimizer, code generation), distributed computing and server side development. He has in the past worked for IBM and Oracle Canada as a developer building Java 7 (hotspot) and telecommunication products. Ankit back in 2008 also published a book on C++ titled C++ for Beginners to Masters which sold over a few thousand copies.

Threads are an illusion - asynchronous programming with boost::asio

By Meeting C++ | Mar 13, 2015 03:17 AM | Tags: performance intermediate efficiency c++11 boost basics

This talk was recorded during the LWG Meeting in Cologne:

Threads are an illusion - asynchronous programming with boost::asio

by Chris Kohlhoff

CppCon 2014 Hardening Your Code--Marshall Clow

By Adrien Hamelin | Mar 11, 2015 08:00 AM | Tags: intermediate 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:

Hardening Your Code

by Marshall Clow

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

Ok, you've written some code, and it seems to work. How can you be sure that it works? It's a busy, complicated, dangerous world out there, and software has to work in lots of different environments.

How can you gain confidence about your code? How can you make your code more reliable?

There are a lot of techniques available to developers today; I'll talk about several of them: Unit tests, static analysis, runtime analysis, fuzzing, decoding compiler warnings and probably others.

CppCon 2014 Creative Coding with C++--Andrew Bell

By Adrien Hamelin | Mar 9, 2015 10:17 AM | Tags: intermediate 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:

Creative Coding with C++

by Andrew Bell

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

Realtime graphics, computer vision, hardware hacking, and audio synthesis are just a few of the crafts that fall under the banner term of "creative coding". In this session we'll talk about some of the creative projects putting C++ in places you might not expect it - everywhere from the Smithsonian's permanent design collection to robotic Coca-Cola dispensers on California beaches. We'll look at a wide spectrum of projects ranging from those of the "maker" community to commercial work from full-time professionals earning their livings in advertising and design agencies. And finally we'll take a look at how you can use the C++ you already know to jumpstart your own creative coding projects using the open source toolkit Cinder.

CppCast Episode 2: Jason Turner on ChaiScript and Cross Platform C++ -- Bob Irving

By robwirving | Mar 6, 2015 10:06 AM | Tags: None

Episode 2 of CppCast, the only podcast by C++ developers for C++ developers. In this episode host Rob Irving interviews Jason Turner about ChaiScript and the benefits of taking your C++ application cross platform.

CppCast Episode 2: Jason Turner on ChaiScript and Cross Platform C++

by Rob Irving

About the interviewee:

Jason has been developing portable C++ since 2002. With very few exceptions, every line of code he has written since then has had to run on multiple platforms. He is an independent contractor focusing on cross-platform issues, utilization of C++ libraries from scripting languages and code quality assurance. He is the co-creator and maintainer of ChaiScript, a mature scripting language designed for modern C++. His latest project is cppbestpractices.com: a fledgling effort to gather the collective wisdom of the C++ community.

CppCon 2014 The Philosophy of Google's C++ Code--Titus Winters

By Adrien Hamelin | Mar 6, 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:

The Philosophy of Google's C++ Code

by Titus Winters

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

The Google C++ Style Guide is a fairly popular guide for C++ coding practices, both at Google and externally, but some of its recommendations often seem dated and have created controversy and perceived tension with more modern C++ In this talk we will focus on the core philosophies underlying that guide, ranging from the common (be consistent) to the unusual (leave an explicit trace for the reader), and debunk the idea that Google's C++ is anything less than modern. We'll discuss how these core ideas inform contentious rules like "No non-const references" and "Don't use exceptions," and how the application of those rules has worked for us in practice, both as developers and reliability engineers (SREs).

CppCon 2014 ...Scaling Visualization in concurrent C++ programs--Fedor G Pikus

By Adrien Hamelin | Mar 4, 2015 08:00 AM | Tags: performance intermediate

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:

...Scaling Visualization in concurrent C++ programs

by Fedor G Pikus

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

High performance is one of the main reasons programmers choose C++ for their applications. If you are writing in C++, odds are you need every bit of computing power your hardware can provide. Today, this means writing multi-threaded programs to effectively utilize the multiple CPU cores that the hardware manufacturers keep adding. Everyone knows that writing multi-threaded programs is hard. Writing correct multi-threaded programs is even harder. Only after spending countless hours debugging race conditions and weird intermittent bugs do many programmers learn that writing efficient multi-threaded programs is harder yet. Have you ever wanted to see what are all your threads doing when they should be busy computing? This talk will show you how.

We begin by studying several techniques necessary for collecting large amounts of data from the running program very efficiently, with little overhead and minimal disruption to the program itself. We will cover efficient thread-safe memory management and efficient thread-safe disk I/O. Along the way we dabble in lock-free programming just enough to meet our needs, lest the subject will spiral into an hour-long talk of its own. With all these techniques put together, we can collect information about what each thread is doing, which threads are computing and what exactly, and which threads are slacking off waiting on locks, and do it at the time scale of tens of microseconds if necessary. Then we process the collected data and create a timeline that shows exactly what the program was doing at every moment in time.

CppCon 2014 Meta Techniques: Heterogeneous Polymorphism&Fast Prototyping at Facebook--Marcelo Juchem

By Adrien Hamelin | Mar 2, 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:

Meta Techniques: Heterogeneous Polymorphism & Fast Prototyping at Facebook

by Marcelo Juchem

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

As data driven systems evolve there's an ever growing demand for bringing new functionality into existing systems in an efficient, maintainable and least intrusive manner. When implementing features with different semantics or interfaces, virtual inheritance requires a compromise between design simplicity and performance. This implies a need for new techniques to achieve heterogeneous polymorphism efficiently. With C++11 and 14, type lists, type maps and variants can now be trivially implemented by the initiated. Facebook moves fast so we quickly adopted the new standards to further explore the capabilities of the type system. This talk demonstrates some meta-programming techniques like reflection and compile-time built structures to achieve heterogeneous polymorphism and fast prototyping.

CppCon 2014 Overview of Parallel Programming in C++--Pablo Halpern

By Adrien Hamelin | Feb 27, 2015 08:00 AM | Tags: performance intermediate

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:

Overview of Parallel Programming in C++

 

by Pablo Halpern

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

Parallel programming was once considered to be the exclusive realm of weather forecasters and particle physicists working on multi-million dollar super computers while the rest us relied on chip manufacturers to crank out faster CPUs every year. That era has come to an end. Clock speedups have been largely replaced by having more CPUs on a chip. Your typical smart phone now has 2 to 4 cores and your typical laptop or tablet has 4 to 8 cores. Servers have dozens of cores and supercomputers have thousands of cores.

If you want to speed up a computation on modern hardware, you need to take advantage of the multiple cores available. This talk is provides an overview of the parallelism landscape. We'll explore the what, why, and how of parallel programming, discuss the distinction between parallelism and concurrency and how they overlap, and learn about the problems that one runs into. We'll conclude with an overview of existing parallelism technologies in C++ and the future directions being considered for parallel programming in standard C++.