CppCon 2017: Building Better Worlds: Developing a Procedural City Tool for Alien...--Alan Bucior

By Adrien Hamelin | Aug 31, 2018 02:29 PM | Tags: None

Have you registered for CppCon 2018 in September? 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:

Building Better Worlds: Developing a Procedural City Tool for Alien...

by Alan Bucior

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

When MPC was asked to create a massive CG city for the film Alien: Covenant, they looked to leverage procedural generation as a means for iterating on the overall shape and structure of the city, in place of a prohibitively large team of environment artists. After evaluating all the practical third party options, it was ultimately decided that the best option was to build a custom tool to procedurally assist artists' city-building skills. This allowed for rapid iteration on the overall look of the city by striking a balance between manual and procedural techniques.

The core algorithms were written in C++ for speed. The user interface was written in Python to accommodate quick feature changes, and a dash of Fabric Engine's KL helped with model import and rendering. This multi-language approach allowed the consistent application of the "best tool for the job" rule, which is a common pattern at MPC, allowing flexible teams with experts in a variety of skillsets.

This talk will detail the history and development of MPC's city building tool, "Machi". Alan Bucior, Lead Developer of Machi, reviews the algorithms for city layout and building placement, discusses how to implement algorithms in an artist-driven manner, and shares various insights gleaned through the development process and discussion with stakeholders.

CppCon 2017: Meta--Andrew Sutton

By Adrien Hamelin | Aug 29, 2018 01:31 PM | Tags: community

Have you registered for CppCon 2018 in September? 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:

Meta

by Andrew Sutton

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

For the past several years, I have been researching new languages to support safe and efficient network protocol processing, specifically for software-defined networking applications. The unfortunate outcome of that research is this conclusion: any language for that domain must also be a general purpose programming language. This is not an easy thing to do. Many of the language features I worked with simply generated expressions to compute packet and header lengths, read and write packet fields, and encode and decode entire packets. If we could do this in C++, I might not need an entirely new language.

Over the past year, Herb Sutter and I have collaborated to work on language support for compile-time programming, static reflection, metaclasses, and code generation in the C++ programming language. These facilities completely eliminate the need for the external tools, metacompilers, and domain-specific languages on which we frequently rely to generate high-performance encoders and decoders in C++.

In this talk, I will discuss how to use these evolving proposals to create facilities for encoding and decoding packets. In particular, I will discuss the background requirements of my work, the overall design of a network protocol library, and the reflection and generation facilities that implement the library.

CppCast Episode 164: SYCL with Gordon Brown

By robwirving | Aug 24, 2018 11:22 AM | Tags: None

Episode 164 of CppCast the only podcast for C++ developers by C++ developers. In this episode Rob and Jason are joined by Gordon Brown to discuss his work on SYCL the OpenCL abstraction layer for C++.

CppCast Episode 164: SYCL with Gordon Brown

by Rob Irving and Jason Turner

About the interviewee:

Gordon is a senior software engineer at Codeplay Software in Edinburgh, specialising in designing and implementing heterogeneous programming models for C++. Gordon spends his days working on ComputeCpp; Codeplay's implementation of SYCL and contributing to various standards bodies including the Khronos group and ISO C++. Gordon also co-organises the Edinburgh C++ user group and occasionally blogs about C++. In his spare time, Gordon enjoys dabbling in game development, board games and walking with his two dogs.

CppCon 2017: Designing A Feature That Doesn't Fit--Patrice Roy

By Adrien Hamelin | Aug 22, 2018 01:25 PM | Tags: community

Have you registered for CppCon 2018 in September? 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:

Designing A Feature That Doesn't Fit

by Patrice Roy

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

C++ is a wonderful and expressive language, that gives programmers a lot of freedom even though it actively seeks to let programmers obtain the maximal performance from their hardware. It so happens that sometimes, operating systems can make it easy to do things that are absolutely not natural for a C++ program, but that some C++ programmers consider essential to their practice.

This talk will explore the problem of adding functionality to the language, more specifically to the standard threading library, where said functionality is not a natural fit for the C++ language specification. Expressed otherwise: how can we find ways to meet the needs of users without corrupting the language we all love?

This talk will be more interesting to you if you have met situations where you wanted to do something in "pure C++" but found you had to resort to operating system-specific features to meet your objectives. We will discuss the design space that has been explored for the problem under study, and will try to make emerge the strengths and weaknesses of the various alternatives.

CppCon 2017: Tools from the C++ eco-system to save a leg--Anastasia Kazakova

By Adrien Hamelin | Aug 20, 2018 01:26 PM | Tags: community

Have you registered for CppCon 2018 in September? 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:

Tools from the C++ eco-system to save a leg

by Anastasia Kazakova

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

C++ gives you enough rope to shoot your leg off. Readable (and thus easy to maintain, easy to support) and error-free code in C++ is often hard to achieve. And while modern C++ standards bring lots of fantastic opportunities and improvements to the language, sometimes they make the task of writing high quality code even harder. Or can’t we just cook them right? Can the tools help?

In this talk I’ll highlight the main trickiness of C++, including readability problems, some real-world issues, problems that grow out of C++ context-dependent parsing. I’ll then try to guide you in how to eliminate them using tools from the C++ eco-system. This will cover code styles and supportive tools, code generation snippets, code analysis (including CLion’s inspections and Data Flow Analysis, C++ Code Guidelines and clang-tidy checks), refactorings. I will also pay some attention to unit testing frameworks and dependency managers as tools that are essential for the high quality code development.

CppCon 2017: C++ atomics, from basic to advanced. What do they really do?--Fedor Pikus

By Adrien Hamelin | Aug 17, 2018 01:22 PM | Tags: community

Have you registered for CppCon 2018 in September? 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:

C++ atomics, from basic to advanced. What do they really do?

by Fedor Pikus

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

C++11 introduced atomic operations. They allowed C++ programmers to express a lot of control over how memory is used in concurrent programs and made portable lock-free concurrency possible. They also allowed programmers to ask a lot of questions about how memory is used in concurrent programs and made a lot of subtle bugs possible.

This talk analyzes C++ atomic features from two distinct points of view: what do they allow the programmer to express? what do they really do? The programmer always has two audiences: the people who will read the code, and the compilers and machines which will execute it. This distinction is, unfortunately, often missed. For lock-free programming, the difference between the two viewpoints is of particular importance: every time an explicit atomic operation is present, the programmer is saying to the reader of the program "pay attention, something very unusual is going on here." Do we have the tools in the language to precisely describe what is going on and in what way it is unusual? At the same time, the programmer is saying to the compiler and the hardware "this needs to be done exactly as I say, and with maximum efficiency since I went to all this trouble."

This talk starts from the basics, inasmuch as this term can be applied to lock-free programming. We then explore how the C++ lock-free constructs are used to express programmer's intent clearly (and when they get in the way of clarity). Of course, there will be code to look at and to be confused by. At the same time, we never lose track of the fact that the atomics are one of the last resorts of efficiency, and the question of what happens in hardware and how fast does it happen is of paramount importance. Of course, the first rule of performance — "never guess about performance!" — applies, and any claim about speed must be supported by benchmarks.

If you never used C++ atomics but want to learn, this is the talk for you. If you think you know C++ atomics but are unclear on few details, come to fill these few gaps in your knowledge. If you really do know C++ atomics, come to feel good (or to be surprised, and then feel even better).

CppCon 2017: How to break an ABI and keep your users happy--Gennadiy Rozental

By Adrien Hamelin | Aug 15, 2018 12:01 PM | Tags: community

Have you registered for CppCon 2018 in September? 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:

How to break an ABI and keep your users happy

by Gennadiy Rozental

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

Technical debt is the bane of most established libraries, whether it is standard library or boost or local library developed in house. Paying this debt is expensive and in many cases seems infeasible.

As a result of several (justified at the time) decisions Google accumulated serious technical debt in how we use std::string. This became a blocking issue in our effort to open source Google’s common libraries.

To fix this we needed to break libstdc++ std::string ABI. This is the story of how we survived it kept Google still running.

CopperSpice: Thread Safety

By Ansel Sermersheim | Aug 14, 2018 01:39 PM | Tags: None

New video on the CopperSpice YouTube Channel:

Thread Safety

by Barbara Geller and Ansel Sermersheim

About the video:

This video covers concepts like thread safety, conditional thread safety, and reentrancy. We discuss the differences between these terms, the vital role that documentation plays in designing thread safe code, and how to effectively and clearly communicate the level of thread safety a particular function provides.

Please take a look and remember to subscribe!

CppCon 2017: My Little Object File: How Linkers Implement C++--Michael Spencer

By Adrien Hamelin | Aug 13, 2018 11:38 AM | Tags: community

Have you registered for CppCon 2018 in September? 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:

My Little Object File: How Linkers Implement C++

by Michael Spencer

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

Ever wonder how the linker turns your compiled C++ code into an executable file? Why the One Definition Rule exists? Or why your debug builds are so large? In this talk we'll take a deep dive and follow the story of our three adventurers, ELF, MachO, and COFF as they make their way out of Objectville carrying C++ translation units on their backs as they venture to become executables. We'll see as they make their way through the tangled forests of name mangling, climb the cliffs of thread local storage, and wade through the bogs of debug info. We'll see how they mostly follow the same path, but each approach the journey in their own way.

We'll also see that becoming an executable is not quite the end of their journey, as the dynamic linker awaits to bring them to yet a higher plane of existence as complete C++ programs running on a machine.

CppCon 2017: So, you inherited a large code base...--David Sankel

By Adrien Hamelin | Aug 10, 2018 12:18 PM | Tags: advanced

Have you registered for CppCon 2018 in September? 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:

So, you inherited a large code base...

by David Sankel

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

This is a talk about solving the most difficult problem a software engineer ever faces, converting a large codebase with antiquated designs and spotty quality into a state-of-the-art, modern system. We'll be covering clang-based refactoring, mnemonic reasoning methods, safe rewrites, coding standards, and, oh yes, migration paths.

If you've ever been tasked with making a legacy codebase the best-in-class, or think you might, then this talk is for you.