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CppCon 2019: Applied WebAssembly: Compiling and Running C++ in Your Web Browser--Ben Smith

By Adrien Hamelin | Sep 19, 2019 12:04 PM | Tags: None

The first videos are becoming available.

Applied WebAssembly: Compiling and Running C++ in Your Web Browser

by Ben Smith

From the video:

WebAssembly is a new technology in all modern browsers designed to let you run high-performance code. Maybe you've heard of WebAssembly before, read an article or two, or even tried to use it with your software project. Since WebAssembly is a low-level language, it's easy to get bogged down in the technical details, and leave without knowing whether WebAssembly will be useful for you. In this talk, I'll take a top-down approach, showing a real problem and how WebAssembly can help.

From August to December this year, I'll be teaching C++ to students at Morehouse College. Having a tool like Compiler Explorer is invaluable as a teaching aid, since it allows the students to immediately see C++ compilation results, on any device that has a web browser. But Compiler Explorer and tools like it require a server to do compilation, so they're hard to use offline. With WebAssembly, we can run the compiler client-side, in the browser, no server required.

First, I'll show how I ported the clang compiler and linker to WebAssembly. Since Clang 8 supports WebAssembly as a compilation target, we can even run the resulting executable sandboxed in the browser. Next, we'll dive into how Clang compiles C++ constructs into WebAssembly. Finally, we'll look at some of the new WebAssembly features in development.

CppCon 2019: Speed Is Found In The Minds of People--Andrei Alexandrescu

By Adrien Hamelin | Sep 18, 2019 12:38 PM | Tags: community

The first videos are arriving!

Speed Is Found In The Minds of People

by Andrei Alexandrescu

From the video:

In all likelihood, sorting is one of the most researched classes of algorithms. It is a fundamental task in Computer Science, both on its own and as a step in other algorithms. Efficient algorithms for sorting and searching are now taught in core undergraduate classes. Are they at their best, or is there more blood to squeeze from that stone? This talk will explore a few less known – but more allegro! – variants of classic sorting algorithms. And as they say, the road matters more than the destination. Along the way, we'll encounter many wondrous surprises and we'll learn how to cope with the puzzling behavior of modern complex architectures.

CopperSpice: Any Optional

By Ansel Sermersheim | Sep 18, 2019 01:11 AM | Tags: None

New video on the CopperSpice YouTube Channel:

Any Optional

by Barbara Geller and Ansel Sermersheim

About the video:

In this video, we discuss the std::any and std::optional classes, what they are, and how you might use them to write type safe code. We also talk about type safety in general, and how it relates to C++.

Please take a look and remember to subscribe!

CppCon 2018: Nano-coroutines to the Rescue! (Using Coroutines TS, of Course)--G. Nishanov

By Adrien Hamelin | Sep 11, 2019 11:50 AM | Tags: experimental community

We’re in the final countdown to this year’s CppCon, which starts on September 16. To whet your appetite for this year’s conference, here’s another of the top-rated talks from last year. Enjoy – and register today for CppCon 2019!

Nano-coroutines to the Rescue! (Using Coroutines TS, of Course)

by G. Nishanov

Summary of the talk:

Are you doing memory lookups in a huge table?
Does your embarrassingly random access to your lookup tables lead to memory stalls?

Fear no more!

We will explore techniques that allow us to do useful work while the prefetcher is busily working on bringing the requested cache lines from main memory, by utilizing nano-coroutines.

And the best part, nano-coroutines can be easily implemented using Coroutines TS that is already available in MSVC and Clang compilers. With a little bit of library support we can utilize the coroutines to extract intra-thread parallelism and quadruple the speed up your lookups.

CppCon 2018: Modern C++ Design--Titus Winters

By Adrien Hamelin | Sep 6, 2019 11:04 AM | Tags: community

We’re in the final countdown to this year’s CppCon, which starts on September 16. To whet your appetite for this year’s conference, here’s another of the top-rated talks from last year. Enjoy – and register today for CppCon 2019!

Modern C++ Design (part 1 of 2)

Modern C++ Design (part 2 of 2)

by Titus Winters

Summary of the talk:

The old rules for C++API design are due for an update - we have made ad hoc changes to design principles in the standard library, but haven’t really written down the new ideas. Parameter passing and API design for free functions/member functions is due for a general update, particularly as a result of rvalue-references and reference qualification. How do we pass non-owning references? How do we sink a T? How do we express “maybe move” APIs? When do we want reference-qualified overload sets? What does an rvalue-reference qualified non-overloaded method mean? How do we express call once semantics?

For types, our consistency in producing Regular types has weakened in recent C++ releases with types like unique_ptr (move-only) and string_view (reference semantics). These classes of design that have shown themselves to be valuable, but certainly surprising at first. As we should not continue to extend the set of type designs arbitrarily, this is a good time to look at type design in the modern C++ era and narrow down the set of designs that are generally favored. This talk will focus on modern C++ design from small (choice of passing by value or reference) to large (Regular types, reference types, move-only types, etc). We will also introduce a taxonomy of type properties as a means to discuss known-good type design families.

We will also dive into the discussion of whether Regular design covers all good design, or whether there is more to the story.

CppCon 2018: Spectre: Secrets, Side-Channels, Sandboxes, and Security--Chandler Carruth

By Adrien Hamelin | Sep 5, 2019 11:46 AM | Tags: community

We’re in the final countdown to this year’s CppCon, which starts on September 16. To whet your appetite for this year’s conference, here’s another of the top-rated talks from last year. Enjoy – and register today for CppCon 2019!

Spectre: Secrets, Side-Channels, Sandboxes, and Security

by Chandler Carruth

Summary of the talk:

The discovery of speculative execution side-channel attacks (called "Spectre") fundamentally changes the security model of every modern superscalar microprocessor. Extracting secret data (credit cards, cryptographic keys) through side-channels is not new and has challenged the cryptographic community for decades. Despite this, the industry has often been complacent in our response, viewing these attacks as impacting a tiny amount of code and being nearly impossible to weaponize. But speculative execution attack techniques have fundamentally altered the ease and applicability of side-channels, making them a serious threat to computer security. Responding to these issues has impacted CPU design, compiler design, library design, sandbox techniques and even the C++ programming language and standard.

This talk will explain how these kinds of attacks work at a high level and provide a clear set of terminology to describe these classes of vulnerabilities and attacks. It will show how the different variants work at the low level of modern hardware to give a detailed and precise understanding of the mechanics involved on CPUs today.

It will also provide guidance about what makes applications and services vulnerable and how to analyze your software to understand the degree of its exposure. It will include an overview of the numerous different mitigation techniques available, how to deploy them, and what tradeoffs come with them. Some of these mitigations will be covered in detail: how they work at a hardware level, where they don't work, and what attack vectors remain.

Finally, the talk will show how traditional side-channel risks are made substantially easier to exploit due to speculative execution. This will cover how cryptographic and other libraries dealing in high-value secrets need to be adapted to correctly defend against these attacks. Further, it will introduce general problems of sandboxing untrusted code from secret data and the current best techniques in those circumstances.

This talk will be accessible to most C and C++ programmers. No deep background on CPUs, assembly, hardware instructions, Spectre, side-channels, or security is needed.

CppCon 2018: Applied Best Practices--Jason Turner

By Adrien Hamelin | Sep 2, 2019 11:21 AM | Tags: community

We’re in the final countdown to this year’s CppCon, which starts on September 16. To whet your appetite for this year’s conference, here’s another of the top-rated talks from last year. Enjoy – and register today for CppCon 2019!

Applied Best Practices

by Jason Turner

Summary of the talk:

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.

CppCon 2018: Simplicity: Not Just For Beginners--Kate Gregory

By Adrien Hamelin | Aug 30, 2019 12:27 PM | Tags: community

We’re in the final countdown to this year’s CppCon, which starts on September 16. To whet your appetite for this year’s conference, here’s another of the top-rated talks from last year. Enjoy – and register today for CppCon 2019!

Simplicity: Not Just For Beginners

by Kate Gregory

Summary of the talk:

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.