CppCon 2016: Iterator Haiku--Casey Carter

By Adrien Hamelin | Jul 31, 2017 12:10 PM | Tags: experimental efficiency

Have you registered for CppCon 2017 in September? Don’t delay – Registration is open now.

While we wait for this year’s event, we’re featuring videos of some of the 100+ talks from CppCon 2016 for you to enjoy. Here is today’s feature:

Iterator Haiku

by Casey Carter

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

Iterator Haiku: How five iterator categories blossomed into seven, and Sentinels trimmed them back to five again. Recently proposed changes to the ranges TS distill its seven iterator categories back to five without sacrificing any expressive power. Removing operations that are extraneous in the Sentinel world eliminates a potential source of programming errors.

itCppCon17: C++ executors to enable heterogeneous computing in tomorrow's C++ today--Michael Wong

By Marco Arena | Jul 31, 2017 03:18 AM | Tags: performance c++20

Videos of the Italian C++ Conference 2017 are popping up. Here is the keynote:

C++ executors to enable heterogeneous computing in tomorrow's C++ today

by Michael Wong

Slides

Summary of the talk:

For a long time, C++ has been outpaced by other models such as CUDA, OpenMP, OpenCL, HSA, which has offered Heterogeneous computing capability to enable dispatch to GPU, DSP, FPGA or other accelerators.
SG14 is an ISO C++ SG that works on low-latency, in the areas of Games, Financial, Embedded programming. One of their mandate is support of heterogeneous in Native C++, without having to drop to some other model as is needed today.
This talk will describe the first and possibly the most important step towards supporting heterogeneous computing with a description of C++ executors, an interface between concurrency constructs, and the agents/resources, one of which can be a GPU core, or a SIMD unit.  I have led a small group of experts from Google, Nvidia, Codeplay, and NASDAQ, to define a specification to enable separation of concerns in defining where, when, and how execution is done in service of the constructs in existing C++ standard library, Concurrency, Parallelism, Transactional Memory, and Networking TS.
This talk will help you understand these TSes which currently only works on CPUs and how they will tie together in future to enable execution on accelerators based on C++ models we already have today such as SYCL, HPX, Kokkos, and Raja. This will enable native C++ to be usable on machine learning algorithms on future self-driving cars, or medical devices.

CppCast Episode 111: Toronto Trip Report with Patrice Roy

By robwirving | Jul 28, 2017 07:02 AM | Tags: None

Episode 111 of CppCast the only podcast for C++ developers by C++ developers. In this episode Rob and Jason are joined by Patrice Roy to talk about the changes made to the C++20 Draft at the Toronto C++ Standards Committee Meeting.

CppCast Episode 111: Toronto Trip Report with Patrice Roy

by Rob Irving and Jason Turner

About the interviewee:

Patrice Roy has been playing with C++, either professionally, for pleasure or (most of the time) both for over 20 years. After a few years doing R&D and working on military flight simulators, he moved on to academics and has been teaching computer science since 1998. Since 2005, he’s been involved more specifically in helping graduate students and professionals from the fields of real-time systems and game programming develop the skills they need to face today’s challenges. The rapid evolution of C++ in recent years has made his job even more enjoyable.

He’s been a participating member in the ISO C++ Standards Committee since late 2014 and has been involved with the ISO Programming Language Vulnerabilities since late 2015. He has five kids, and his wife ensures their house is home to a continuously changing number of cats, dogs and other animals.

CppCon 2016: GDB - A Lot More Than You Knew--Greg Law

By Adrien Hamelin | Jul 26, 2017 01:15 PM | Tags: community

Have you registered for CppCon 2017 in September? Don’t delay – Registration is open now.

While we wait for this year’s event, we’re featuring videos of some of the 100+ talks from CppCon 2016 for you to enjoy. Here is today’s feature:

GDB - A Lot More Than You Knew

by Greg Law

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

If you’re writing C++ for anything other than Windows, chances are that you occasionally break out GDB. This session presents some of the lesser known features of GDB that can change the way you debug. GDB has come a long way in the last few years and now does so much more than break, print, step and continue. Reversible debugging; Non-Stop Mode; Multi-process Debugging; and Dynamic Printf are but some of its best features, and its built-in Python scripting is particularly powerful. Join Undo co-founder and CEO, Greg Law, as he takes you through a series of demos to show some amazing tricks with GDB and some of its powerful new (and not-so-new) features that you may not have heard of.

CppCon 2016: Constant Fun--Dietmar Kühl

By Adrien Hamelin | Jul 24, 2017 12:43 PM | Tags: performance efficiency

Have you registered for CppCon 2017 in September? Don’t delay – Registration is open now.

While we wait for this year’s event, we’re featuring videos of some of the 100+ talks from CppCon 2016 for you to enjoy. Here is today’s feature:

Constant Fun

by Dietmar Kühl

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

This presentation discusses why it is useful to move some of the processing to compile time and shows some applications of doing so. In particular it shows how to create associative containers created at compile time and what is needed from the types involved to make it possible. The presentation also does some analysis to estimate the costs in terms for compile-time and object file size.

Specifically, the presentation discusses:
- implications of static and dynamic initialization – the C++ language rules for implementing constexpr functions and classes supporting constexpr objects.
- differences in error handling with constant expressions.
- sorting sequences at compile time and the needed infrastructure – creating constant associative containers with compile-time and run-time look-up.

CppCon 2016: There and Back Again: An Incremental C++ Modules Design--Richard Smith

By Adrien Hamelin | Jul 21, 2017 10:54 AM | Tags: experimental community

Have you registered for CppCon 2017 in September? Don’t delay – Registration is open now.

While we wait for this year’s event, we’re featuring videos of some of the 100+ talks from CppCon 2016 for you to enjoy. Here is today’s feature:

There and Back Again: An Incremental C++ Modules Design

by Richard Smith

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

The Clang project has been working on Modules in one form or another for many years. It started off with C and Objective-C many years ago. Today, we have a C++ compiler that can transparently use C++ Modules with existing C++ code, and we have deployed that at scale. However, this is very separate from the question of how to integrate a modular compilation model into the language itself. That is an issue that several groups working on C++ have been trying to tackle over the last few years.

Based on our experience deploying the core technology behind Modules, we have learned a tremendous amount about how they interact with existing code. This has informed the particular design we would like to see for C++ Modules, and it centers around incremental adoption. In essence, how do we take the C++ code we have today, and migrate it to directly leverage C++ Modules in its very syntax, while still interacting cleanly with C++ code that will always and forever be stuck in a legacy mode without Modules.

In this talk we will present our ideas on how C++ Modules should be designed in order to interoperate seamlessly with existing patterns, libraries, and codebases. However, these are still early days for C++ Modules. We are all still experimenting and learning about what the best design is likely to be. Here, we simply want to present a possible and still very early design direction for this feature.

CppCast Episode 110: Coroutines with Gor Nishanov

By robwirving | Jul 21, 2017 07:07 AM | Tags: None

Episode 110 of CppCast the only podcast for C++ developers by C++ developers. In this episode Rob and Jason are joined by Gor Nishanov to talk about the C++ Coroutines proposal.

CppCast Episode 110: Coroutines with Gor Nishanov

by Rob Irving and Jason Turner

About the interviewee:

Gor Nishanov is a Principal Software Design Engineer on the Microsoft C++ team. He works on design and standardization of C++ Coroutines, and on asynchronous programming models. Prior to joining C++ team, Gor was working on distributed systems in Windows Clustering team.

CppCon 2016: The C++17 Parallel Algorithms Library and Beyond--Bryce Adelstein Lelbach

By Adrien Hamelin | Jul 19, 2017 12:13 PM | Tags: performance c++17

Have you registered for CppCon 2017 in September? Don’t delay – Registration is open now.

While we wait for this year’s event, we’re featuring videos of some of the 100+ talks from CppCon 2016 for you to enjoy. Here is today’s feature:

The C++17 Parallel Algorithms Library and Beyond

by Bryce Adelstein Lelbach

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

One of the major library features in C++17 is a parallel algorithms library (formerly the Parallelism Technical Specification v1). The parallel algorithms library has both parallel versions of the existing algorithms in the standard library and a handful of new algorithms inspired by common patterns from parallel programming (such as std::reduce() and std::transform_reduce()).

We’ll talk about what’s in the parallel algorithms library, and how to utilize it in your code today. Also, we’ll discuss some exciting future developments relating to the parallel algorithms library which are targeted for the second version of the Parallelism Technical Specification – executors, and asynchronous parallel algorithms.

CppCon 2016: Make Friends with the Clang Static Analysis Tools--Gabor Horvath

By Adrien Hamelin | Jul 14, 2017 02:17 PM | Tags: community

Have you registered for CppCon 2017 in September? Don’t delay – Registration is open now.

While we wait for this year’s event, we’re featuring videos of some of the 100+ talks from CppCon 2016 for you to enjoy. Here is today’s feature:

Make Friends with the Clang Static Analysis Tools

by Gabor Horvath

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

This talk is an overview of the open source static analysis tools for C++. The emphasis is on Clang based tools. While this talk is not intended to be a tutorial how to develop such tools I will cover the algorithms, methods and interesting heuristics that are utilized by them. Understanding these methods can be really useful as it helps us write more static analysis friendly code and understand the cause of false positive results. It will also help to understand limitations of the currently available tools. I will also present some guidelines how to make a library static analysis friendly, to make clients interested in such tools happy. I will also give a short tutorial on how to use these tools and how to integrate them into the work flow.

CppCast Episode 109: CopperSpice with Barbara Geller and Ansel Sermersheim

By robwirving | Jul 14, 2017 07:50 AM | Tags: None

Episode 109 of CppCast the only podcast for C++ developers by C++ developers. In this episode Rob and Jason are joined by Barbara Geller and Ansel Sermersheim to talk about the CopperSpice C++ GUI Library.

CppCast Episode 109: CopperSpice with Barbara Geller and Ansel Sermersheim

by Rob Irving and Jason Turner

About the interviewees:

Barbara is an independent consultant working as a programmer and software developer for over 25 years. She has been a featured speaker at more than a dozen trade shows and computer conferences in the US and on two separate occasions Barbara taught an extended class in software architecture and GUI design for the Panama Canal Commission in Panama.

Ansel has been working as a programmer for over 15 years. Ansel worked for 8 years at a communications company designing scalable, high performance, multi-threaded network daemons in C++ and he is currently a software consultant for RealityShares in San Francisco.