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Cppcon 2021 Embracing PODs Safely Until They Die--Alisdair Meredith and Nina Ranns

Registration is now open for CppCon 2021, which starts on October 24 and will be held both in person and online. To whet your appetite for this year’s conference, we’re posting some upcoming talks that you will be able to attend this year. Here’s another CppCon future talk we hope you will enjoy – and register today for CppCon 2021 to attend in person, online, or both!

Embracing PODs Safely Until They Die

Thursday, October 28 • 10:30am - 11:30am

by Alisdair Meredith and Nina Ranns

Summary of the talk:

How do you change the active member of a union? Can you copy an object without
a publicly callable copy constructor? Can you pass classes having private data to
a function implemented in C? What is the use case for the library type trait
`std::is_trivially_move_assignable`? All these questions and more will be answered
in this session.

PODs --- Plain Old Data --- are neither plain nor old in C++11, and continued to
evolve in every published standard since, until they were finally banished in C++20.
In researching the deconstruction of PODs for the upcoming book, "Embracing
Modern C++ Safely" Alisdair Meredith (and the other authors including John
Lakos, Vittorio Romeo, and Rostislav Khlebnikov) discovered that many of the
intuitive properties and capabilities of trivial and standard layout types did not
behave quite as expected, and there are many subtleties waiting to catch the
unwary. Nina Ranns, as an active member of the Core working group, stepped in
to explain and resolve many concerns, while pointing out further bad assumptions.
Together they will present the use cases, pitfalls, and annoyances of these features
as now properly understood, giving a flavor of the presentation style of each of the
57 C++11/14 features presented in the book.

Compiler Explorer with Cmake--Gajendra Gulgulia

New capabilities.

Compiler Explorer with Cmake

by Gajendra Gulgulia

From the article:

Compiler explorer has been one of the most widely used online tool for compiling C++ code, doing experiment with C++ features, sharing code snippets with friends and colleagues and also (my favorite feature) to compare and prove with the help of assembly code why a certain way of coding might be good or bad compared to another way.
Recently compiler explorer added support for compiling multiple files with CMakeLists.txt [1] . This opens up a new possibilities for developers around the world from testing complex pieces of code to testing the compilation behavior of the same.
In this issue, I would like to give a walk through on how to set up a simple layout of three files compiled with CMakelists.txt. Note that the focus is on setting up compiler explorer for multiple files and not on code efficiency. Also the article might at first glance look lengthy, but it may only be due to 19 images in the tutorial. So don’t get weighed down by the size of the article and lets start!

Cppcon 2021 What You Can Learn from Being Too Cute: Why You Should Write Code That...--Daisy Hollman

Registration is now open for CppCon 2021, which starts on October 24 and will be held both in person and online. To whet your appetite for this year’s conference, we’re posting some upcoming talks that you will be able to attend this year. Here’s another CppCon future talk we hope you will enjoy – and register today for CppCon 2021 to attend in person, online, or both!

What You Can Learn from Being Too Cute: Why You Should Write Code That You Should Never Write

Friday, October 29 • 1:30pm - 2:30pm

by Daisy Hollman

Summary of the talk:

During the COVID-19 global pandemic, as we all searched for ways to stay connected to the C++ community, I innocently started posting short, 25-line or less C++ snippets of counterintuitive C++ code that I called my "Cute C++ trick of the day." I was floored by the amount of attention these tweets received, with some being viewed more than 30,000 times and liked or retweeted hundreds of times. I received repeated requests to collect these tricks into a library or talk, and this is that talk.

In this presentation, I will dissect a few of my most popular "Cute C++ tricks" to a level of detail not possible on social media platforms like Twitter. I'll talk about how and why these tricks work the way they do, talk about the dark corners of C++ they touch upon, and talk about what you should actually do if you need to produce the same effect in production code. While not targeted at beginners, these tricks span the gauntlet from features that most intermediate programmers are aware of (but never thought to use in a particular way) to dark corners of the language that many of my C++ committee colleagues were surprised to learn about. Throughout it all runs a common thread: learning how to exploit your own curiosity to expand your toolbox, gain a better grasp of the fundamentals of C++, and ultimately, become a better programmer.

Cppcon 2021 A (Short) Tour of C++ Modules--Danila Kutenin

Registration is now open for CppCon 2021, which starts on October 24 and will be held both in person and online. To whet your appetite for this year’s conference, we’re posting some upcoming talks that you will be able to attend this year. Here’s another CppCon future talk we hope you will enjoy – and register today for CppCon 2021 to attend in person, online, or both!

A (Short) Tour of C++ Modules

Tuesday, October 26 • 3:15pm - 4:15pm

by Danila Kutenin

Summary of the talk:

Once you decide to start a big project or a company, it eventually comes down to unifying the build infrastructure. However, hundreds and thousands of compilation units are extremely difficult to maintain to achieve the highest possible performance. Contrary to the belief that you should always trust your compiler, recent micro-architectural breakthroughs from merging two arrays with special instructions to JSON parsing through SIMD showed that compilers are far from understanding every single piece of code you write. In this session we will talk about our experience on how to achieve the highest possible performance without much rewriting of your code, which trade-offs C++ compilers have, how to make the most of your micro-architecture, why unrelated changes may decrease the performance and how to debug them. In the end we will show which compiler options gave us the opportunity to gain 5-15% of performance, stabilized the benchmarks and decreased the build size for search engines, databases and high performance computing.

Cppcon 2021 Back To Basics: Overload Resolution--Barbara Geller and Ansel Sermersheim

Registration is now open for CppCon 2021, which starts on October 24 and will be held both in person and online. To whet your appetite for this year’s conference, we’re posting some upcoming talks that you will be able to attend this year. Here’s another CppCon future talk we hope you will enjoy – and register today for CppCon 2021 to attend in person, online, or both!

Back To Basics: Overload Resolution

Tuesday, October 26 • 9:00am - 10:00am

by Barbara Geller and Ansel Sermersheim

Summary of the talk:

During this talk we will explain the definition of a function overload and what rules the compiler follows to decipher which overload to call. The rules can be complex and may not always do what you expect. We will condense the C++ standard to the essential rules every programmer should be aware of in order to reason through overload resolution.

Knowing how overload resolution works will improve your ability to debug compiler errors and this is vital to write correct code. We will provide simple and concise explanations for various buzzwords like template argument deduction, implicit conversion, standard conversions, and tie-breakers.

This talk is part of the Back to Basics track and the material will be targeted to include all skill levels. Familiarity with C++ is recommended however no prior knowledge of function overloads is required.

C++ Russia 2021 Conference

C++ Russia, 15 Nov - 18 Nov is a conference with several tracks of in-depth technical talks devoted to C++.

C++ Russia

About the conference

The conference covers topics like

  • concurrency;
  • performance;
  • architecture;
  • infrastructure solutions.

All you need to make your code more concise and productive.

Among speakers:

  • Titus Winters, Google;
  • Phil Nash, SonarSource;
  • Anton Polukhin, Yandex Go;
  • Denis Yaroshevskiy, Bloomberg.

You can view the list of speakers and the first program on the website.

CppCon 2021 Code Analysis++--Anastasia Kazakova

Registration is now open for CppCon 2021, which starts on October 24 and will be held both in person and online. To whet your appetite for this year’s conference, we’re posting some upcoming talks that you will be able to attend this year. Here’s another CppCon future talk we hope you will enjoy – and register today for CppCon 2021 to attend in person, online, or both!

Code Analysis++

Tuesday, October 26 • 7:45am - 8:45am

by Anastasia Kazakova

Summary of the talk:

Martin Fowler once wrote that high-quality software is actually cheaper to produce than low-quality software. We agree with that sentiment, and we warmly welcomed the C++ Core Guidelines when they were introduced in 2015. Research and surveys conducted in the C++ Community consistently demonstrate the popularity of the Clang family of tools, as well as the growing demand for static analysis to be added to code editors.

In this talk, we’ll explore the current capabilities of existing C++ static analyzers and discuss some of the enforcements listed in the C++ Core Guidelines from a toolability aspect. We’ll also look into the recent “Simplify C++” trend in the language’s evolution, and to wrap things up we’ll take a look at how technology-specific analysis (like MISRA and AUTOSAR) is being adopted.

A variety of checks will be discussed, from catching a dangling pointer to conforming to the preferred code style and naming scheme. And I want to share a crazy idea I have about gamifying static analysis. Let’s play!

CppCon 2020 Constructing Generic Algorithms: Principles and Practice--Ben Deane

Registration is now open for CppCon 2021, which starts on October 24 and will be held both in person and online. To whet your appetite for this year’s conference, we’re posting videos of some of the top-rated talks from our most recent in-person conference in 2019 and our online conference in 2020. Here’s another CppCon talk video we hope you will enjoy – and why not register today for CppCon 2021 to attend in person, online, or both!

Constructing Generic Algorithms: Principles and Practice

by Ben Deane

Summary of the talk:

"You have all these algorithms at your disposal. *Learn them.*"
-- Sean Parent, GoingNative 2013.

Great advice, and the algorithms can do a lot. But they can't do everything, and the fixed set in the standard was never meant to be the last word in every problem. Sometimes we do need to write our own solutions. What are the best practices for that?

This talk examines how to build our own algorithms. We'll start with a raw loop that solves a nontrivial problem, and turn it into a generic algorithm capable of supporting a wide variety of use cases without loss of expressivity or efficiency.

Along the way we'll consider algorithmic patterns, how to structure the
interface, how the types interact, iterator category concerns, testing, and
more. We'll look at how ranges and concepts help us to refine and focus things.

We'll also see where the existing algorithms fall short, and take a look at some non-obvious use cases, including some minor modifications or wrappings that give us extra flexibility.

CppCon 2019 Behind Enemy Lines - Reverse Engineering C++ in Modern Ages--Gal Zaban

Registration is now open for CppCon 2021, which starts on October 24 and will be held both in person and online. To whet your appetite for this year’s conference, we’re posting videos of some of the top-rated talks from our most recent in-person conference in 2019 and our online conference in 2020. Here’s another CppCon talk video we hope you will enjoy – and why not register today for CppCon 2021 to attend in person, online, or both!

Behind Enemy Lines - Reverse Engineering C++ in Modern Ages

by Gal Zaban

Summary of the talk:

What do C++ programs really look like? When developers think about hierarchy and virtual calls they see it as design patterns and code but reverse engineers look at it from a different angle, they think about Assembly puzzles.

C++ is known as a tangled language, templates, lambdas and pointers. All of these features create a jungle of objects intended to make life easier for the programmer. But once the program is compiled, the target program is no longer what it once seemed.

Reversing C++ programs is tedious, demanding, and requires rebuilding inheritance, identifying templates and tainting program flow in order to combat the ties of function overloading and class utilization.

C++ Binaries are a world of mysteries. In my presentation I am going to show how C++ binaries looks like after compilation and how reverse engineers see C++ binaries and understand their logic...