By robwirving | Oct 5, 2018 10:16 AM | Tags: None
Episode 169 of CppCast the only podcast for C++ developers by C++ developers. In this episode Rob and Jason give a Cppcon trip report before being joined by several guests who gave Lightning Talks at CppCon 2018.
CppCast Episode 169: CppCon Lightning Interviews
by Rob Irving and Jason Turner
By Blog Staff | Oct 3, 2018 02:55 PM | Tags: None
The CppCon 2018 closing keynote is now on YouTube:
Spectre: Secrets, Side-Channels, Sandboxes, and Security
by Chandler Carruth
From the description:
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.
By Blog Staff | Sep 30, 2018 09:49 AM | Tags: None
The CppCon 2018 Thursday plenary session is now on YouTube:
Thoughts on a more powerful and simpler C++ (5 of N)
by Herb Sutter
From the description:
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 monthI’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
By Blog Staff | Sep 28, 2018 10:01 AM | Tags: None
The CppCon 2018 Wednesday keynote is now on YouTube:
Simplicity: Not Just for Beginners
by Kate Gregory
Kate Gregory has been using C++ since before Microsoft had a C++ compiler. She writes, mentors, codes, and leads projects, in both C++ and .NET, especially for Windows. Kate is a Microsoft Regional Director, a Visual C++ MVP, has written over a dozen books, and speaks at conferences and user groups around the world. Kate develops courses on C++, Visual Studio, and Windows programming for Pluralsight.
From the description:
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.
By Blog Staff | Sep 28, 2018 06:56 AM | Tags: None
The CppCon 2018 Tuesday keynote is now on YouTube:
Patterns and Techniques Used in the Houdini 3D Graphics Application
by Mark Elendt, SideFX
Mark Elendt has been an active practitioner at SideFX software for over 25 years. He works primarily on low level libraries for Houdini but also is the chief author of the mantra production rendering engine. He was honored to receive the Scientific and Technical Academy Award of Merit for his contributions to Houdini.
From the description:
Earlier this year, Mark Elendt and SideFX were awarded the Scientific and Technical Award of Merit for their continued work and innovation on the Houdini Visual Effects software package.
Not only has Houdini been used in all of the Visual Effects Academy Award winning films of the past 10 years, but it has also been used for television shows like Game of Thrones and Stranger Things as well as content creation for many AAA video games, and even for scientific visualization.
Houdini artists are tasked with creating amazing, never before seen visual effects. They constantly push both performance and scale in the software. Since the early 1990's Houdini's C++ architecture has provided a flexible platform that has enabled artists from around the world to create their vision.
Mark will discuss some of the patterns and approaches that have been used in Houdini to meet the demands of production, from the early days of dealing with c-front to embracing modern features provided by modern C++.
By Blog Staff | Sep 25, 2018 03:08 PM | Tags: None
Yesterday's opening keynote is now on YouTube:
Concepts: The Future of Generic Programming (the future is here)
by Bjarne Stroustrup
Note: The conference still intends to professionally caption the videos, but for the keynotes the primary goal is to get them up as quickly as possible. The automatic YouTube captions are available now and have fairly decent quality.
By robwirving | Sep 21, 2018 04:32 PM | Tags: None
Episode 168 of CppCast the only podcast for C++ developers by C++ developers. In this episode Rob and Jason are joined by Bryce Adelstein Lelbach to discuss his work on the upcoming CppCon conference, his thoughts on the graphics proposal and more.
CppCast Episode 168: CppCon Preview with Bryce Adelstein Lelbach
by Rob Irving and Jason Turner
About the interviewee:
Bryce Adelstein Lelbach is a software engineer on the CUDA driver team at NVIDIA. Bryce is passionate about parallel programming. He maintains Thrust, the CUDA C++ core library. He is also one of the initial developers of the HPX C++ runtime system. He spent five years working on HPX while he was at Louisiana State University's Center for ComCppputation and Technology, and three years at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (a US Department of Energy research facility) developing and analyzing new parallel programming models for exascale and post-Moore architectures. He also helped start the LLVMLinux initiative, and has occasionally contributed to the Boost C++ libraries. Bryce is an organizer for the C++Now and CppCon conferences as well as the Bay Area C++ user group, and he is passionate about C++ community development. He is a member of the ISO C++ standard committee. He worked on the C++17 parallel algorithms; today, he works on standardizing better futures, executors, and multi-dimensional arrays.
By Pawel Kurdybacha | Sep 20, 2018 11:38 AM | Tags: None
All the ways past, present and future that one can disappoint deterministically in C++.
Deterministic Disappointment
by Niall Douglas
Content of the talk:
1. What is disappointment?
2. What is determinism?
3. The direction of C++
4. Future disappointment in C++?
5. Achieving the future today
a. C++ 11 system_error
b. C++ 11 P1028 SG14 status_code
c. C++ 14 (Boost.) Outcome
By Adrien Hamelin | Sep 19, 2018 12:57 PM | Tags: community
Have you registered for CppCon 2018 in September? Late registration is open now.
While we wait for this year’s event, we’re featuring videos of some of the 100+ talks from CppCon 2017 for you to enjoy. Here is today’s feature:
Web | C++
by Lukas Bergdoll
(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)
Summary of the talk:
Have you ever tried writing a web application with C++? Can opening a file and serving it via HTTP be as simple as writing 20 lines of python? With the undeniable importance of web development, C++ can not allow itself to ignore such an important field, especially with the rising competition in the field of system programming languages, coming from Rust, D and Go.
Join us as we explore modern approaches to asynchronous IO, socket communication the advantages and disadvantages of using a unikernel and their respective performance implications.
We'll also take a look at how future iterations of the C++ standard library, could solve some of those problems.
By Adrien Hamelin | Sep 17, 2018 11:59 AM | Tags: community
Have you registered for CppCon 2018 in September? Late registration is open now.
While we wait for this year’s event, we’re featuring videos of some of the 100+ talks from CppCon 2017 for you to enjoy. Here is today’s feature:
Class Template Argument Deduction: A New Abstraction
by Zhihao Yuan
Summary of the talk:
C++17 is often quoted as “just a better C++14”, suggesting that nothing is new, nothing is changing the way we program. This talk presents class template argument deduction as a counterexample, a hidden gem in the new standard.
Saves typing? A replacement for the `make` functions? If that’s your frame, then you should come to this talk. The true power of class template argument deduction is underestimated. It’s a new point of abstraction but requiring creativity, insights, and understanding about the language details to manage.
This talk will start by introducing all matters about this feature to build up sufficient background knowledge, followed by teaching how to write deduction guides by examples, and finally explain how to build abstractions using the whole feature in a top-down approach, with patterns categorized.