CppCast Episode 58: CLion with Anastasia Kazakova

By robwirving | Jun 3, 2016 07:16 AM | Tags: None

Episode 58 of CppCast the only podcast for C++ developers by C++ developers. In this episode Rob and Jason are joined by Anastasia Kazakova to discuss new features of JetBrains' Clion IDE.

CppCast Episode 58: CLion with Anastasia Kazakova

by Rob Irving and Jason Turner

About the interviewee:

A C/C++ fan since university, Anastasia has been creating real-time *nix-based systems and pushing them to production for 8 years. She has a passion for networking algorithms (especially congestion problems and network management protocols) and embedded programming, and believes in good tooling. Now she is a part of the JetBrains team working as a Product Marketing Manager for CLion, a cross-platform C/C++ IDE.

CppCon 2015 Beyond Sanitizers...--Kostya Serebryany

By Adrien Hamelin | Jun 1, 2016 02:37 PM | Tags: advanced

Have you registered for CppCon 2016 in September? Don’t delay – Early Bird 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:

Beyond Sanitizers...

by Kostya Serebryany

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

At CppCon’2014 we presented the Sanitizers, a family of dynamic testing tools for C++. These tools allow you to find many stability and security bugs in C++ code, but they are only as good as your tests are. In this talk we will show how to improve your tests with guided fuzzing and how to protect your applications in production even if some bugs were not found. Fuzzing, or fuzz testing, is a surprisingly effective technique that allows you to discover new interesting test inputs. Coverage-guided fuzzing uses coverage-like code instrumentation to make fuzzing orders of magnitude more efficient. Taint-guided fuzzing goes even further by using taint tracking techniques. The next line of defense may be incorporated directly into production: the Control Flow Integrity instrumentation allows you to protect your program from corrupted function pointers (including pointers to virtual tables) and separating stack variables from the call stack protects from corrupted return addresses -- both with near-zero overhead. We will concentrate on particular tools implemented in the opensource LLVM toolchain (libFuzzer, DataFlowSanitizer, -fsanitize=cfi,safe_stack), but will also discuss several alternatives.

C++ Today--Bjarne Stroustrup

By Adrien Hamelin | May 30, 2016 01:59 PM | Tags: experimental c++14

An interesting video to watch!

C++ Today

by Bjarne Stroustrup

Summary of the video:

During a short visit to College on 13 May 2016, Bjarne gave a talk describing what C++ is today (May 2016, C++14) and how it can be used well. He will focus on ISO standard C++ and the way it is developing.

CppCon 2015 Lambdas from First Principles: A Whirlwind Tour of C++--Arthur O'Dwyer

By Adrien Hamelin | May 30, 2016 01:53 PM | Tags: intermediate c++14

Have you registered for CppCon 2016 in September? Don’t delay – Early Bird 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:

Lambdas from First Principles: A Whirlwind Tour of C++

by Arthur O'Dwyer

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

Lambdas (even those mysterious generic lambdas) are just syntactic sugar atop constructs that are perfectly understandable when approached from the right direction.

We'll start with the implementation of C-style functions, then move to overloading, function templates, non-static member functions, C++11 lambdas, and then demystify C++14 generic ("auto") lambdas. Finally, we'll detour into the implementations of std::function and std::bind to show how they're different from lambdas.

C++ Modules - Spring Update--Gabriel Dos Reis

By Adrien Hamelin | May 27, 2016 02:35 PM | Tags: experimental efficiency

Let's talk about modules!

C++ Modules - Spring Update

by Gabriel Dos Reis

Abstract

“Modules” are a frequently requested and long-awaited feature by C++ programmers. The basic idea is a direct language support for (a) expressing the boundaries and dependencies of program components; (b) isolating source codes from macro vagaries; (c) scaling compile time, especially for large projects, given the ubiquity of “headers-only” template libraries; (d) spur innovation and deployment of semantics-aware developer tools. I will give an overview of the design points, goals, with emphasis on how modules address the four major problems mentioned above. I will also address standardization process and implementation issues

CppCast Episode 57: Runtime Compiled C++ with Doug Binks

By robwirving | May 27, 2016 09:59 AM | Tags: None

Episode 57 of CppCast the only podcast for C++ developers by C++ developers. In this episode Rob and Jason are joined by Doug Binks from Enkisoftware to discuss Runtime Compile C++.

CppCast Episode 57: Runtime Compiled C++ with Doug Binks

by Rob Irving and Jason Turner

About the interviewee:

Doug Binks is programming the game Avoyd using Runtime Compiled C++, a technique he co-developed with industry friends; and enkiTS, a lightweight task scheduler.

An experienced game developer, Doug was previously Technical Lead of the Game Architecture Initiative at Intel. He has worked in the games industry in roles ranging from the R&D development manager at Crytek to head of studio at Strangelite, as well as lead programmer. An early interest in games development was sidetracked by a doctorate in Physics at Oxford University, and two post-doctoral posts as an academic researcher in experimental nonlinear pattern formation, specializing in fluid mechanics. His fondest childhood memories are of programming games in assembly on the ZX81.

CppCon 2015 C++ Multi-dimensional Arrays...--Pramod Gupta

By Adrien Hamelin | May 25, 2016 01:43 PM | Tags: performance intermediate

Have you registered for CppCon 2016 in September? Don’t delay – Early Bird 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++ Multi-dimensional Arrays...

by Pramod Gupta

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

The language feature of passing a multi-dimensional array to a function without specifying all its dimensions at compile time is crucial for computational physics and applied mathematics. For example a matrix is a two dimensional array and a matrix inversion function which needs to know the size of the matrix at compile time would be of limited use. Major general purpose languages such as C, Java and C# support this feature. Of course, scientific programming languages like Fortran, Matlab and R also support this feature.

C++ is perhaps the only major programming language which does not allow passing a multi-dimensional array to a function unless the size of all the dimensions except the first one is known at compile time. Due to this limitation of C++, various libraries have been developed for using multi-dimensional arrays in C++. Some of these libraries are Blitz++, Armadillo, Eigen and boost.multi_array. These libraries are very large and complex. While they do provide a wide variety of features, they have a learning curve which may be difficult to justify for something as basic as passing multi-dimensional arrays to functions. Also the computational physics or applied mathematics code becomes dependent on a large non-standard library. Hence its usage will be limited to only those scientists who are willing to install these non-standard libraries.

The reference feature of C++ allows us to develop a multi-dimensional array class. The class has a small number of lines of code and hence the code can be included with the scientific application code. We use this class to write programs for various areas of computational physics and show that the class is easy to use and it leads to readable programs.

CppCon 2015 C++ Metaprogramming: A Paradigm Shift--Louis Dionne

By Adrien Hamelin | May 23, 2016 12:17 PM | Tags: intermediate efficiency

Have you registered for CppCon 2016 in September? Don’t delay – Early Bird 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++ Metaprogramming: A Paradigm Shift

by Louis Dionne

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

Most people think metaprogramming is hard. It isn't; we just didn't have the right tools for it. This talk will present a new way of metaprogramming using the same syntax as that of normal C++. It will show how the runtime and the compile-time boundaries can be crossed almost seamlessly. It will show how compilation times can be reduced without sacrificing expressiveness. It will introduce Hana [1], a newly accepted Boost library using cutting edge features of the language in a creative way to solve the problem of metaprogramming for good.

C++ Weekly Episode 12: C+17's std::any -- Jason Turner

By Jason Turner | May 23, 2016 05:24 AM | Tags: c++17

Episode 12 of C++ Weekly.

C++17's std::any

by Jason Turner

About the show:

In this episode Jason introduces std::any from the upcoming proposed C++17 standard.

James McNellis' talks @Italian C++ Conference 2016

By Marco Arena | May 23, 2016 12:09 AM | Tags: community

The talks James McNellis gave at the Italian C++ Conference 2016 are now online:

An Introduction to C++ Coroutines

One of the most interesting new features being proposed for C++ standardization is coroutines, formerly known as “resumable functions.”  C++ coroutines are designed to be highly scalable, highly efficient (no overhead), and highly extensible, while still interacting seamlessly with the rest of the C++ language.

This session will consist of an in-depth introduction to C++ coroutines.  We will begin by looking at the rationale for adding coroutines to the C++ language and then look at several examples that show [1] how to write a coroutine, [2] how to use the extensibility model to adapt existing libraries to work with C++ coroutines, and [3] how coroutines really work “under the hood,” using the Visual C++ implementation as a reference.  Finally, we will look briefly at the status of the C++ coroutines proposal and some of the competing ideas.

Slides

Adventures in a Legacy Codebase

Three years ago, the Visual C++ team undertook a project to substantially modernize and redesign the Microsoft C Runtime (CRT) with the goals of improving long-term maintainability, performance, and usability.  This work culminated with the release of the Universal CRT with Windows 10 and Visual Studio 2015.

In this session, I will discuss our team’s experiences from this project.  We’ll look at some of the techniques we used in modernizing a decades-old codebase and look at some of the challenges that we faced, lessons that we learned, and best practices that we developed during the course of the project.

Slides