Video & On-Demand

CppCon 2015 Racing The File System--Niall Douglas

Have you registered for CppCon 2016 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 2015 for you to enjoy. Here is today’s feature:

Racing The File System

by Niall Douglas

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

Almost every programmer knows about and fears race conditions on memory where one strand of execution may concurrently update data in use by another strand of execution, leading to an inconsistent and usually dangerous inconsistent read of program state. Almost every programmer therefore is aware of mutexes, memory ordering, semaphores and the other techniques used to serialise access to memory.

Interestingly, most programmers are but vaguely aware of potential race conditions on the filing system, and as a result write code which assumes that the filing system does not suddenly change out from underneath you when you are working on it. This assumption of a static filing system introduces many potential security bugs never mind ways of crashing your program, and of course creating data loss and corruption.

This workshop will cover some of the ways in which filing system races can confound, and what portable idioms and patterns you should employ to prevent misoperation, even across networked Samba shares. Finally, an introduction of the proposed Boost library AFIO will be made which can help application developers writing filing system race free code portably.

CppChat 2015-08-21: Jason Turner and Matt Bentley

Video chat:

CppChat 08-21 with Jason and Matt

with Jason Turner, Matt Bentley, and Jon Kalb

From the chat:

We discuss CppCon sessions including Matt's session on the game-friendly containers that he has created and Jason's plenary talk about writing a game for Commodore 64 in C++17, the reprisal of his award-winning C++Now talk on "Practical Performance Practices," and his talk with Rob Irving on their CppCast experiences. Along the way we discuss the history of the 6502 and Stepanov's observation that the STL was not designed with today's hardware in mind.

CppCon 2015 C++ Rcpp: Seamless R and C++ Integration--Matt P. Dziubinski

Have you registered for CppCon 2016 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 2015 for you to enjoy. Here is today’s feature:

Rcpp: Seamless R and C++ Integration

by Matt P. Dziubinski

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

R is an open-source statistical language designed with a focus on data analysis. While its historical roots are in statistical applications, it is currently experiencing a rapid growth in popularity in all fields where data matters: from data science, through bioinformatics and finance, to machine learning. Key strengths contributing to this growth include its rich libraries ecosystem (over 6 thousands packages at the moment of writing) – often authored by the leading researchers in the field, providing early access to the latest techniques; beautiful, high-quality visualizations – supporting seamless exploratory data analysis and producing stunning presentations; all of this available in an interactive environment resulting in high productivity through fast iteration times.

At the same time, there are no free lunches in programming: the dynamic, interactive nature of R does have its costs, including a significant impact on run-time performance. In an era of growing data sizes and increasingly realistic models this concern is only becoming more important.

In this talk we provide an introduction to Rcpp – a library allowing smooth integration of R with C++, combining the productivity benefits of R for data science together with the performance of C++. First released in 2005, today it’s the most popular language extension for R -- used by over 400 packages. We'll also discuss challenges (as well as possible solutions) involved in integrating modern C++ code, and demonstrate the usage of popular C++ libraries in practice. We’ll conclude the talk with the RInside package allowing to embed R in C++.

CppCon 2015 C++ on the Web: Ponies for developers without pwn’ing users--JF Bastien

Have you registered for CppCon 2016 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 2015 for you to enjoy. Here is today’s feature:

C++ on the Web: Ponies for developers without pwn’ing users

by JF Bastien

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

Is it possible to write apps in C++ that run in the browser with native code speed? Yes. Can you do this without the security problems associated with running native code downloaded from the net? Yes and yes. Come to this session to learn how.

We'll showcase some resource-intensive applications that have been compiled to run in the browser. These applications run as fast as native code with access to cornerstone native programming APIs—modern C++ STL, OpenGL, files and processes with full access to C++’s concurrency and parallelism—all in an architecture- and OS-agnostic packaging. Then, we'll describe how we deliver native code on the web securely, so developers get their C++ ponies and users don’t get pwn’d. We’ll also touch on the fuzzing, code randomization, and sandboxing that keep the billions of web users safe.

CppCon 2015 std::allocator Is to Allocation what std::vector Is to Vexation--Andrei Alexandrescu

Have you registered for CppCon 2016 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 2015 for you to enjoy. Here is today’s feature:

std::allocator Is to Allocation what std::vector Is to Vexation

by Andrei Alexandrescu

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

std::allocator has an inglorious past, murky present, and cheerless future. STL introduced allocators as a stop gap for the now antiquated segmented memory models of the 1990s. Their design was limited and in many ways wasn't even aiming at helping allocation that much. Because allocators were there, they simply continued being there, up to the point they became impossible to either uproot or make work, in spite of valiant effort spent by the community.

But this talk aims at spending less time on poking criticism at std::allocator and more on actually defining allocator APIs that work.

Scalable, high-performance memory allocation is a topic of increasing importance in today's demanding applications. For such, std::allocator simply doesn't work. This talk discusses the full design of a memory allocator created from first principles. It is generic, componentized, and composable for supporting application-specific allocation patterns.

CppCon 2015 Lessons in Sustainability: How to Maintain a C++ Codebase for Decades--Titus Winters

Have you registered for CppCon 2016 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 2015 for you to enjoy. Here is today’s feature:

Lessons in Sustainability: How to Maintain a C++ Codebase for Decades

by Titus Winters

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

Google maintains (we believe) the largest monolithic C++ codebase in the world with over 100M lines of C++ code. Early commits to this repository date back to the late 1990s. About 4000 engineers submit at least one change in C++ every week. We’ve learned a few things about what it takes to maintain a codebase at this scale.

In this talk I’ll present some of the lessons we’ve learned over the years with respect to policies, technology, education, design, and maintenance of a long-lived monolithic codebase.

CppCast Episode 67: CMake Server with Stephen Kelly

Episode 67 of CppCast the only podcast for C++ developers by C++ developers. In this episode Rob and Jason are joined by Stephen Kelley to discuss his work on the CMake Server project which will enable advanced tooling for CMake.

CppCast Episode 67: CMake Server with Stephen Kelly

by Rob Irving and Jason Turner

About the interviewee:

Stephen Kelly first encountered CMake through working on KDE and like many C++ developers, did his best to ignore the buildsystem completely. That worked well for 4 years until 2011 when the modularization of KDE libraries led to a desire to simplify and upstream as much as possible to Qt and CMake. Since then, Stephen has been responsible for many core features and designs of 'Modern CMake' and now tries to lead designs for its future.