CppCon 2015 Advanced Unit Testing in C & C++--Matt Hargett

By Adrien Hamelin | Jun 6, 2016 01:19 PM | Tags: 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:

Advanced Unit Testing in C & C++

by Matt Hargett

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

This session goes in-depth into advanced techniques to isolate and unit test C++ classes, especially those in legacy code that isn't easy to change. This builds on the Pragmatic Unit Testing in C++ talk from last year, with live code examples of safe refactorings, injecting mock objects, and potential pitfalls across different platforms and toolchains.

C++ Weekly Episode 14: Standard Library Gems: `next` and `exchange`—Jason Turner

By Jason Turner | Jun 6, 2016 11:59 AM | Tags: c++14 c++11 basics

Episode 14 of C++ Weekly.

Standard Library Gems: `next` and `exchange`

by Jason Turner

About the show:

In this episode Jason discusses two somewhat obscure and surprisingly helpful C++ standard library functions, std::next which was introduced in C++11 and std::exchange which was introduced in C++14.

 

CppCon 2015 Variadic Templates in C++11 / C++14 - An Introduction--Peter Sommerlad

By Adrien Hamelin | Jun 3, 2016 02:26 PM | Tags: c++14 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:

Variadic Templates in C++11 / C++14 - An Introduction

by Peter Sommerlad

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

Writing class templates and functions accepting a variable number of arguments has been a burden before C++11. With variadic templates, both class templates with a variable number of arguments as well as functions can be formulated much easier and more type safe way.

Nevertheless, the authoring of variadic templates can be challenging for the uninitiated. Even the interpretation of variadic template code can be a problem, as Olve Maudal's famous pub quiz shows.

This session will build up understanding and the ability to use and author variadic template functions and variadic template classes from easy examples up to more complicated applications such as employing std::forward correctly, std::integer_sequence and other upcoming language features such as a template UDL operator that bridges the gap between string literals and std::integer_sequence.

Understanding pack expansion, sizeof... and other hard to get on first sight issues are my goal. In the end you should have seen guidelines that help you avoid the template instantiation trap from the pub quiz and correct usage of std::forward in your variadic templates.

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.