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

By Adrien Hamelin | Aug 19, 2016 01:52 PM | Tags: performance community

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

By Adrien Hamelin | Aug 17, 2016 01:51 PM | Tags: performance community

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

By Adrien Hamelin | Aug 15, 2016 12:43 PM | Tags: performance efficiency

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

By Adrien Hamelin | Aug 12, 2016 02:06 PM | Tags: intermediate efficiency community

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

By robwirving | Aug 12, 2016 07:59 AM | Tags: None

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.

CppCon 2015 Reflection Techniques in C++--Paul Fultz II

By Adrien Hamelin | Aug 10, 2016 01:11 PM | Tags: community boost

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:

Reflection Techniques in C++

by Paul Fultz II

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

Reflection is a very powerful and useful feature used in many languages to achieve things like serialization, object-relationship mapping, and general data-driven development. C++ doesn't support reflection natively in the language yet. There are proposals to add compile-time reflection to the language, but C++ has survived all this time without direct support for reflection.

This talk will discuss the various techniques the can be used to achieve reflection including boost fusion, the visitor patter, and do-it-yourself with some macros and metaprogramming. This talk will discuss how these techniques can be used to implement serialization or object-relational mapping.

CppCon 2015 constexpr: Applications--Scott Schurr

By Adrien Hamelin | Aug 8, 2016 02:03 PM | Tags: performance c++14

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:

constexpr: Applications

by Scott Schurr

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

I'm excited about constexpr. It's probably my favorite C++11 feature and it's gotten even better with C++14. But when I talk to other developers about constexpr they seem puzzled. What sorts of useful computations can the compiler possibly do before runtime?

I'd like to take this session to explore some of the capabilities that constexpr brings to the table. We'll look at compile-time parsing, floating-point computations, and containers. We'll also talk about motivations for computing these at compile time.

This session builds on the "constexpr: Introduction" talk.

CppCon 2015 C++ Atomics: The Sad Story of memory_order_consume--Paul E. McKenney

By Adrien Hamelin | Aug 5, 2016 01:52 PM | Tags: performance experimental

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++ Atomics: The Sad Story of memory_order_consume: A Happy Ending At Last?

by Paul E. McKenney

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

One of the big advantages of C++ atomics is that developers can now let the compiler know about the intent behind their multi-threaded synchronization mechanisms. At least they can tell the compiler as long as the synchronization mechanism in question is not RCU. You see, all production compilers promote RCU's memory_order_consume to memory_order_acquire. Although this promotion does ensure correctness, it also ensures the additional overhead of memory-barrier instructions on weakly ordered systems and of needlessly suppressed compiler optimizations on all systems.

All previous attempts to resolve this issue have foundered on either standard-committee reluctance to eviscerate the standard for a special case, compiler-writer reluctance to eviscerate their compilers for a special case, and kernel-developers reluctance to eviscerate their source base for late-to-the-party compiler support.

But now there is a glimmer of hope in the guise of a small set of small patches to the Linux kernel that eliminate the most challenging use cases. Will this hope be realized? Come to this talk to here the story, which by September will hopefully have a happy ending!