Presenter Interviews: Klaus Iglberger

by Bob Steagall

In this week’s interview, Kevin chats with Klaus Iglberger about his upcoming class Modern C++ Design Patterns; we also find out more about the Back to Basics track and his talk on Move Semantics.

Applied Best Practices

by Jason Turner

What happens when we start a project from scratch and try to apply all of the best practices? How well do constexpr, noexcept, [[nodiscard]] and other features interact with each other? Is it possible to apply all of the best practices at once, or will they conflict with each other? We will explore current best practices and examine their impact on compile time, runtime and testing. We'll also see some of the unexpected effects that result when best practices are applied to a new project.

Simplicity: Not Just For Beginners

by Kate Gregory

Many people say that simple code is better code, but fewer put it into practice. In this talk I’ll spend a little time on why simpler is better, and why we resist simplicity. Then I’ll provide some specific approaches that are likely to make your code simpler, and discuss what you need to know and do in order to consistently write simpler code and reap the benefits of that simplicity.

The Bits Between the Bits: How We Get to main()

by Matt Godbolt

When you run your C++ code, have you ever considered how the linker, loader, operating system, C and C++ runtime all work so hard to get everything set up for you to start running your code in main()?

In this Linux-focused talk, Matt will talk about how the linker stitches together your code and how that fits in with dynamic linking. He'll touch on debugging issues with the loader, and how ODR violations can manifest themselves. Then he'll take a look at what's going on behind the scenes to get the C runtime up, and then the C++ runtime, along with all the global object constructors - showing more reasons why you shouldn't be using them!

By the end of the talk you should have an understanding of how a bundle of object files are brought together by the linker, along with the relevant runtimes, and then loaded and executed by the operating system.

Presenter Interviews: Emery Berger

by Bob Steagall

In this week’s presenter interview, Kevin talks with Professor Emery Berger about his time working with memory management in C++, what he is looking forward to at this years conference, and his session Mesh: Automatically Compacting Your C++ Application’s Memory.

Can I has grammar?

by Timur Doumler

Lightning talk.

105 STL Algorithms in Less Than an Hour

by Jonathan Boccara

We are all aware that we should know the STL algorithms. Including them in our designs allows us to make our code more expressive and more robust. And sometimes, in a spectacular way.

But do you know your STL algorithms?

In this presentation, you’ll see the 105 algorithms that the STL currently has, including those added in C++11 and C++17. But more than just a listing, the point of this presentation is to highlight the different groups of algorithms, the patterns they form in the STL, and how the algorithms relate together. And all this in an entertaining way.

This kind of big picture is the best way I know to actually remember them all, and constitute a toolbox chock-full of ways to make our code more expressive and more robust.

Presenter Interviews: Matthew Butler

by Bob Steagall

In this week’s presenter interview, Kevin chats with Matthew Butler today about his upcoming class at CppCon, Exploiting Modern C++: Building Highly-Dependable Software, his first WG21 meeting in Cologne, and his upcoming CppCon talk If You Can’t Open It, You Don’t Own It.

Thoughts on a more powerful and simpler C++ (5 of N)

by Herb Sutter

Perhaps the most important thing we can do for C++ at this point in its evolution is to make sure we preserve its core strengths while also directing its evolution in ways that make it simpler to use. That is my own opinion at least, so this talk starts with a perspective question: What “is C++,” really? The language continues to evolve and change; as it does so, how can we be sure we’re picking C++ evolutionary improvements that not only don’t lose its “C++-ic” qualities, but make it a better C++ than ever?

At recent CppCons, I’ve spoken about several of my own personal C++ evolution efforts and experiments, and why I think they’re potentially important directions to explore for making C++ both more powerful and also simpler to use. The bulk of the talk is updates on two of these:

1. Lifetime and dangling: At CppCon 2015, Bjarne Stroustrup and I launched The C++ Core Guidelines in our plenary talks. In my part starting at 29:06, I gave an early look at my work on the Guidelines “Lifetime” profile, an approach for diagnosing many common cases of pointer/iterator dangling at compile time, with demos in an early MSVC-based prototype. For this year’s CppCon, I’ll cover what’s new, including:
    • use-after-move diagnoses
    • better support for the standard library out of the box without annotation
    • more complete implementations in two compilers: in MSVC as a static analysis extension, and in a Clang-based implementation that is efficient enough to run during normal compilation
    • the complete 1.0 Lifetime specification being released on the Guidelines’ GitHub repo this month

I’ll summarize the highlights but focus on what’s new, so I recommend rewatching that talk video as a refresher for background for this year’s session.

2. Metaclasses: In my CppCon 2017 talk, I gave an early look at my “metaclasses” proposal to use compile-time reflection and compile-time generation to make authoring classes both more powerful and also simpler. In this case, “simpler” means not only eliminating a lot of tedious boilerplate, but also eliminating many common sources of errors and bugs. For this year, we’ll cover what’s new, including:
    • an update on the Clang-based implementation, which now supports more use cases including function parameter lists
    • new examples, including from domains like concurrency
    • an updated P0707 paper, with more links to working examples live on Godbolt, being posted in the next few weeks for the pre-San Diego committee mailing

OOP Is Dead, Long Live Data-oriented Design

by Stoyan Nikolov

For decades C++ developers have built software around OOP concepts that ultimately failed us - we didn’t see the promises of code reuse, maintenance or simplicity fulfilled, and performance suffers significantly. Data-oriented design can be a better paradigm in fields where C++ is most important - game development, high-performance computing, and real-time systems.

The talk will briefly introduce data-oriented design and focus on practical real-world examples of applying DoD where previously OOP constructs were widely employed.

Examples will be shown from modern web browsers. They are overwhelmingly written in C++ with OOP - that’s why most of them are slow memory hogs. In the talk I’ll draw parallels between the design of systems in Chrome and their counterparts in the HTML renderer Hummingbird. As we’ll see, Hummingbird is multiple times faster because it ditches OOP for good in all performance-critical areas.

We will see how real-world C++ OOP systems can be re-designed in a C++ data-oriented way for better performance, scalability, maintainability and testability.