CppCast Episode 21: VS2015 and the Universal CRT with James McNellis

By robwirving | Aug 7, 2015 04:35 AM | Tags: None

Episode 21 of CppCast the only podcast by C++ developers for C++ developers. In this episode Rob and Jason are joined by James McNellis to discuss new features for C++ developers in Visual Studio 2015 and changes made to the C runtime.

CppCast Episode 21: VS2015 and the Universal CRT with James McNellis

by Rob Irving and Jason Turner

About the interviewee:

James McNellis is a senior engineer on the Visual C++ team at Microsoft, where he works on C++ libraries.  He’s spent the past three years working on a major redesign and refactoring of the Visual C++ C Runtime, which culminated in the release of the Universal CRT with Windows 10 and  Visual Studio 2015.  He occasionally speaks at C++ conferences and was at one time a prolific C++ contributor on Stack Overflow.

CppCon 2014 Lightning Talks--Introduction to Undodb--Julian Smith

By Adrien Hamelin | Aug 5, 2015 08:00 AM | Tags: advanced

Have you registered for CppCon 2015 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 2014 for you to enjoy. Here is today’s feature:

Introduction to Undodb

by Julian Smith

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

UndoDB's performance and low memory consumption allows you to step your application backward, as well as forward, faster than any other commercial or open-source reversible debugger. By stepping back in your program, setting a watchpoint or replaying non-deterministic bugs, you can get straight to the root cause of the bugs upsetting your customers, decreasing your productivity and slowing your software releases.

CppCon 2014 Practical Type Erasure--Cheinan Marks

By Adrien Hamelin | Aug 3, 2015 08:00 AM | Tags: intermediate

Have you registered for CppCon 2015 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 2014 for you to enjoy. Here is today’s feature:

Practical Type Erasure

by Cheinan Marks

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

Type erasure looks like a neat concept, but what are its real life uses? This talk will briefly show the inner workings of type erasure, and demonstrate a real working implementation of a configuration system from public domain production code. Uses and pitfalls of type erasure will also be covered.

CppCon 2014 Polymorphism with Unions--Jason Lucas

By Adrien Hamelin | Jul 31, 2015 07:46 AM | Tags: intermediate

Have you registered for CppCon 2015 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 2014 for you to enjoy. Here is today’s feature:

Polymorphism with Unions

by Jason Lucas

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

Using tagged unions to create families of polymorphic types that are more flexible and more easily maintained than those formed with inheritance alone. We demonstrate the design pattern and implementation techniques of sum types with examples from a compiler development project. We also examine the technique's impact on project management and engineering and on algorithm design, including the role of type switches, value type semantics, and multiple dispatch polymorphism.

CppCon 2014 Using C++ to Connect to Web Services--Steve Gates

By Adrien Hamelin | Jul 29, 2015 11:19 AM | Tags: community

Have you registered for CppCon 2015 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 2014 for you to enjoy. Here is today’s feature:

Using C++ to Connect to Web Services

by Steve Gates

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

Many languages have great support for connecting to web services. Trying to connect C++ applications to the cloud is difficult. The C++ standard library doesn't contain anything for networking (yet), and with the proliferation of devices, being able to do so in a cross platform manner is even more appealing. Often requiring use of multiple different styled, and potentially low level, libraries where asynchrony wasn't designed from the start. Or by building your own abstract layers over platform and operating system APIs, all of which distract from focusing on the core logic of your application.

The C++ REST SDK makes connecting to services easier by creating APIs focused on simplicity and asynchrony, built using tasks from the Parallel Patterns Library. This is done by putting together a series of cross platform libraries for working with HTTP, WebSockets, JSON, URIs, and OAuth. In many cases building on top of other popular open source libraries like Boost, OpenSSL, and WebSocket++. This talk will take a practical approach looking at what is involved in connecting to some of the common popular services from C++, using the C++ REST SDK and other libraries. Several tutorial style example and demos will be done using C++ code that runs on all the major platforms.

CppCon 2014 sqlpp11, An SQL Library Worthy Of Modern C++--Roland Bock

By Adrien Hamelin | Jul 27, 2015 11:49 AM | Tags: performance community

Have you registered for CppCon 2015 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 2014 for you to enjoy. Here is today’s feature:

sqlpp11, An SQL Library Worthy Of Modern C++

by Roland Bock

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

SQL and C++ are both strongly typed languages. They should play well together. But most C/C++ interfaces to SQL databases are string based. They force the developer to effectively hide the SQL types, names and expression structures from the compiler. This defers the validation of SQL expressions until runtime, i.e. unit tests or even production. And the strings might even be vendor specific, because different databases expect different dialects of SQL in those strings.

That feels wrong. Modern C++ can do better.

This talk gives an introduction to sqlpp11, a templated embedded domain specific language for SQL in C++. It allows you to build type-safe SQL expressions with type-safe results, all of which can be verified at compile time, long before your code enters unit tests or even production.

In addition to its obvious use with relational databases, sqlpp11 can also serve as an SQL frontend for all kinds of data sources: Since sqlpp11 offers complete SQL expression trees even at compile time, it isn't hard to apply SQL expressions to std::vector or std::map for instance, or streams, or XML, or JSON, you name it. With your help, sqlpp11 could become for C++ what LINQ is for C#.

CppCon 2014 C++ Memory Model Meets High-Update-Rate Data Structures--Paul E. McKenney

By Adrien Hamelin | Jul 24, 2015 08:00 AM | Tags: performance

Have you registered for CppCon 2015 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 2014 for you to enjoy. Here is today’s feature:

C++ Memory Model Meets High-Update-Rate Data Structures

by Paul E. McKenney

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

Highly performant and scalable techniques such as RCU and hazard pointers have been quite successful in read-mostly situations. However, there do come times when updates are necessary. It would be convenient if there was some general update-side counterpart to these techniques, but sadly there is not yet any such thing. Nevertheless, there are a number of specialized update-side techniques whose performance and scalability rival those of RCU and hazard pointers. This talk will discuss several of them, one of which is a solution to a challenge to the speaker at the 2014 Issaquah C++ standards committee meeting. This talk will also provide an outlook into the future of low-overhead scalable updates.

CppCon 2014 Costless Software Abstractions for Parallel Architectures--Joel Falcou

By Adrien Hamelin | Jul 22, 2015 08:00 AM | Tags: experimental efficiency

Have you registered for CppCon 2015 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 2014 for you to enjoy. Here is today’s feature:

Costless Software Abstractions for Parallel Architectures

by Joel Falcou

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

Performing large, intensive or non-trivial computing on array like data structures is one of the most common task in scientific computing, video game development and other fields. This matter of fact is backed up by the large number of tools, languages and libraries to perform such tasks. If we restrict ourselves to C++ based solutions, more than a dozen such libraries exists from BLAS/LAPACK C++ binding to template meta-programming based Blitz++ or Eigen. If all of these libraries provide good performance or good abstraction, none of them seems to fit the need of so many different user types.

Moreover, as parallel system complexity grows, the need to maintain all those components quickly become unwieldy. This talk explores various software design techniques - like Generative Programming, MetaProgramming and Generic Programming - and their application to the implementation of a parallel computing librariy in such a way that:

- abstraction and expressiveness are maximized - cost over efficiency is minimized

We'll skim over various applications and see how they can benefit from such tools. We will conclude by discussing what lessons were learnt from this kind of implementation and how those lessons can translate into new directions for the language itself.

CppCon 2014 Hourglass Interfaces for C++ APIs--Stefanus DuToit

By Adrien Hamelin | Jul 20, 2015 08:00 AM | Tags: intermediate efficiency

Have you registered for CppCon 2015 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 2014 for you to enjoy. Here is today’s feature:

Hourglass Interfaces for C++ APIs

by Stefanus DuToit

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

C++ provides a much richer set of abstractions than C. Classes, templates, overloading, and other core C++ features can be leveraged for more readable syntax, better compile time typechecking, more open ended genericity and improved modularity. On the flip side, C89 still boasts some advantages over C++, especially when viewed through a pragmatic lens. C ABIs on many platforms have been stable for decades, practically every language supports binding to C code through foreign function interfaces, and including nearly any C89 header has a negligible effect on compile time on modern computers.

The Hourglass pattern provides the best of both worlds. It's a way to structure libraries that retains the pragmatic benefits of C89 while still providing C++'s richness both at an interface and implementation level. It makes providing bindings from other languages to C++ libraries easier, and insulates from ABI issues such as incompatibilities between debug and release variants of runtimes. This talk provides an overview of the pattern, teaches practical techniques for its implementation using C++98 and C++11, and shares experience from using the pattern in real world projects.

CppCon 2014 C++ Test-driven Development--Peter Sommerlad

By Adrien Hamelin | Jul 17, 2015 08:00 AM | Tags: intermediate

Have you registered for CppCon 2015 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 2014 for you to enjoy. Here is today’s feature:

C++ Test-driven Development

by Peter Sommerlad

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

Unit Testing and TDD, if applied correctly, lead to high quality and simple code. If done by hand, both often require writing some boiler-plate code and can be slow and cumbersome. Especially refactoring without good tool support can be a burden. Java and C# developers are used to have good tool support for these tasks to be effective. Many C++ developers often aren't even aware of the need for the practices, because without tool support and training of the goals, they are hard to discover.

This talk introduces C++ Unit Testing, Test-driven Development, and Refactoring and demonstrates the tooling available for Eclipse CDT for free on www.cevelop.com that was inspired and implemented by the author and his team.

For example, when phrasing a unit test to use a to-be-defined class, the class is generated automatically from its name used as a type. Another tool feature is simplifying a function, by extracting a sub-function and placing a call in its place.