Overload 153 is now available

Predictions and Predilections.
Forecasting the future is difficult. Frances Buontempo has a foreboding sense that a lack of impartially makes things even harder.

Scenarios Using Custom DSLs.
Natural-language BDD can be hard to maintain. Liz Keogh demonstrates a simple code-based alternative.

OOP Is not Essential.
People tend to love or hate Object Oriented Programming. Lucian Teodorescu considers a recent OOP claim.

I Come Here Not to Bury Delphi, But to Praise It.
What helps a programming language gain traction? Patrick Martin remembers why he used to use Delphi.

C++ Pipes.
Expressive code can make life easier. Jonathan Boccara demonstrates fluent pipelines for collections in C++.

Code analysis with clang-tidy in Visual Studio

by Eli Fessler

Visual Studio 2019 version 16.4 Preview 1 brings a significant improvement to the C++ code analysis experience: native support for clang-tidy, a Clang-based “linter” tool developed by the LLVM Project that delivers a variety of code improvements such as modernization and standards conformance, static analysis, and automatic formatting...

Call for Proposals

by the ACCU

The ACCU Conference is put on by ACCU (https://accu.org), but is open to anyone who wishes to be there either as a presenter or an attender.

The Call for Papers lasts for about 3 weeks and will close on Friday 2019-10-25 23:59+01:00.

Milestone | New Home | Trip Reports

by Jon Kalb

CppCon 2019 was the first year in our new home at the Gaylord Rockies in Aurora, Colorado.

Long before I’d ever done it, I told people that I thought that moving a conference is almost as much work as starting one from scratch. Now that I have moved a conference, I’ve learned that started a conference from scratch is actually easier than moving that conference after it has been growing in one location for five years...

Join the Maryland C++ User Group

After looking for and failing to find a C++ user group in Maryland, I decided to start one. If you live in the Baltimore/DC/NoVA area, use C++ for work or pleasure, and are interested in attending monthly-ish meetings related to C++, please join the meetup group at https://meetup.com/CppMaryland/. Topics for discussion will include current (C++11/14/17) features, the upcoming C++20 standard, build tools, standard containers and algorithms, design patterns, and pretty much anything else that might benefit a C++ developer...

CppCon 2019 Trip Report and Slides

by Anthony Williams

Having been back from CppCon 2019 for over a week, I thought it was about time I wrote up my trip report...

C++ Core Guidelines: Bounds Safety

by Rainer Grimm

Today's post is about the second profile of the C++ Core Guidelines: Bounds Safety. The goal of the profile bounds safety is it that you operate inside the bounds of allocated memory...

Expressive Code for State Machines in C++

by Valentin Tolmer

Have you ever run into this kind of comments?

// IMPORTANT: Do not call this function before calling SetUp()!

Or checks like these:

if (my_field_.empty()) abort();

Those are all symptoms of a (often light-weight) protocol that our code must respect. Or sometimes, you have an explicit protocol that you’re following, such as in the implementation of an SSL handshake or other business logic. Or maybe you have an explicit state machine in your code, with the transitions checked each time against a list of possible transitions.

Let’s have a look at how we can expressively handle these cases...

C++ Core Guidelines: Type Safety by Design

by Rainer Grimm

What does that mean: type safety by design. Type safety by design just means, that you always initialise your variables, use std::variant instead of a union, or prefer variadic templates and fold expressions to va_arg's...

De-fragmenting C++: Making Exceptions and RTTI More Affordable and Usable

by Herb Sutter

A fundamental reason why C++ is successful and loved is its adherence to Stroustrup’s zero-overhead principle: You don’t pay for what you don’t use, and if you do use a feature you can’t reasonably code it better by hand. In the C++ language itself, there are only two features that violate the zero-overhead principle, exception handling and RTTI – and, unsurprisingly, these are also the only two C++ language features that every C++ compiler has switches to turn off and that are regularly discouraged or even banned. This matters because not using these features is the largest current cause of fragmentation of the C++ community into incompatible dialects, and the cause of recurring problems including type confusion security vulnerabilities arising from “didn’t down-cast using dynamic_cast because that would be too slow.” This talk is about ongoing long-term efforts to try to unify the community in this area, not by replacing exceptions and RTTI, but by doubling down: fully embracing exceptions and RTTI, and improving them so they can be zero-overhead too.