CppCon 2016: Deploying C++ modules to 100s of millions of lines of code--Manuel Klimek

By Adrien Hamelin | Jun 30, 2017 02:57 PM | Tags: performance experimental community

Have you registered for CppCon 2017 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 2016 for you to enjoy. Here is today’s feature:

Deploying C++ modules to 100s of millions of lines of code

by Manuel Klimek

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

Compile times are a pain point for C++ programmers all over the world. Google is no exception.. We have a single unified codebase with hundreds of millions of lines of C++ code, all of it built from source. As the size of the codebase and the depth of interrelated interfaces exposed through textually included headers grew, the scaling of compiles became a critical issue.

Years ago we started working to build technology in the Clang compiler that could help scale builds more effectively than textual inclusion. This is the core of C++ Modules: moving away from the model of textual inclusion. We also started preparing our codebase to migrate to this technology en masse, and through a highly automated process. It's been a long time and a tremendous effort, but we'd like to share where we are as well as what comes next.

In this talk, we will outline the core C++ Modules technology in Clang. This is just raw technology at this stage, not an integrated part of the C++ programming language. That part is being worked on by a large group of people in the ISO C++ standards committee. But we want to share how Google is using this raw technology internally to make today's C++ compiles faster, what it took to get there, and how you too can take advantage of these features. We will cover everything from the details of migrating a codebase of this size to use a novel compilation model to the ramifications for both local and distributed build systems. We hope to give insight into the kinds of benefits that technology like C++ Modules can bring to a large scale C++ development environment.

Making things do stuff – Part 6--Glennan Carnie

By Mantosh Kumar | Jun 29, 2017 05:05 PM | Tags: community advanced

The series continues.

Making things do stuff – Part 6

by Glennan Carnie

From the article:

As code designers we tend to eschew specific ‘stove-pipe’ code in favour of reusable code elements.  Up until now we’ve been coding some very specific examples so it’s probably worth looking at some more generic solutions.

In this article we’ll look at building generic register manipulation classes (or, as one commenter referred to them, ‘register proxy’ classes).  Here, we’re really exploring code design rather than coding ‘mechanics’.  I’m using this to explore some factors like the balance between efficiency, performance and flexibility...

Making things do stuff – Part 5--Glennan Carnie

By Mantosh Kumar | Jun 28, 2017 04:57 PM | Tags: community advanced

The series continues.

Making things do stuff – Part 5

by Glennan Carnie

From the article:

We’ve been looking at using C++ to manipulate I/O hardware.   Previously, we’ve looked at the fundamentals of hardware manipulation; and how to encapsulate these mechanisms into classes.  If you’ve not been following along I’d recommend reading the previous articles first before continuing.

This time we’ll explore a lesser-known feature of C++ and its application in hardware manipulation – placement new...

Making things do stuff – Part 4--Glennan Carnie

By Mantosh Kumar | Jun 27, 2017 04:03 AM | Tags: community advanced

The series continues.

Making things do stuff – Part 4

by Glennan Carnie

From the article:

In the last article we explored the design of a class to encapsulate a physical hardware device.  In that article I deliberately ignored how the class would actually interact with the hardware.

In this article we explore the options available to us for accessing hardware and the consequences of those choices...

CppCon 2016: Building Software Capital: How to write the highest quality code and why--David Sankel

By Adrien Hamelin | Jun 26, 2017 12:25 PM | Tags: efficiency community

Have you registered for CppCon 2017 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 2016 for you to enjoy. Here is today’s feature:

Building Software Capital: How to write the highest quality code and why

by David Sankel

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

This talk discusses the ins and outs of how to write software that is at such a high standard that it gets reused everywhere. It covers organization, design, infrastructure, testing, documentation, reviews, and general suggestions based on my experience in the industry.

Meeting C++ 2017: Call for sponsors

By Meeting C++ | Jun 26, 2017 07:33 AM | Tags: conference community

The Meeting C++ conference is looking for sponsors

Meeting C++ 2017: Call for sponsors

by Jens Weller

From the article:

Like in the last 5 years, the Meeting C++ conference is looking for companies willing to support the conference through sponsoring! There is also the limited option of presenting your company at the conference with a booth!

CppCon 2016: The strange details of std::string at Facebook--Nicholas Ormrod

By Adrien Hamelin | Jun 21, 2017 08:00 AM | Tags: performance community

Have you registered for CppCon 2017 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 2016 for you to enjoy. Here is today’s feature:

The strange details of std::string at Facebook

by Nicholas Ormrod

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

Standard strings are slowing you down. Strings are everywhere. Changing the performance of std::string has a measurable impact on the speed of real-world C++ programs. But how can you make strings better? In this talk, we'll explore how Facebook optimizes strings, especially with our open-source std::string replacement, fbstring. We'll dive into implementation tradeoffs, especially the storage of data in the struct; examine which standard rules can and cannot be flouted, such as copy-on-write semantics; and share some of the things we've learned along the way, like how hard it is to abolish the null-terminator. War stories will be provided.

CppCon 2017 Call for Poster Submissions

By Bob Steagall | Jun 20, 2017 11:12 AM | Tags: cppcon community

The next CppCon conference is in Bellevue, Washington September 24-29.

CppCon 2017 Call for Poster Submissions

by Bob Steagall

From the announcement:

Are you doing something really cool with C++? We want you to share it with the C++ community by creating a poster and presenting it at CppCon 2017.

The poster submissions deadline is July 23, with decisions sent by August 14.  For topic ideas, submission instructions, and advice on making the best possible submission, see the CppCon 2017 Poster Submissions page.

Live Webinar: Developing C/C++ projects with CLion IDE and Conan C/C++ package manager--Kazakova

By Adrien Hamelin | Jun 16, 2017 12:09 PM | Tags: community

Learning about interesting tools!

Live Webinar: Developing C/C++ projects with CLion IDE and Conan C/C++ package manager

by Anastasia Kazakova

From the article:

This webinar will provide an introduction to developing large C/C++ projects using the package modularization and reuse offered by Conan package manager, and the power and convenience of the CLion IDE, using the CMake build system.

CppCon 2016: Bringing Clang and C++ to GPUs: An Open-Source, CUDA-Compatible GPU C++ Compiler--Lebar

By Adrien Hamelin | Jun 16, 2017 12:04 PM | Tags: performance community

Have you registered for CppCon 2017 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 2016 for you to enjoy. Here is today’s feature:

Bringing Clang and C++ to GPUs: An Open-Source, CUDA-Compatible GPU C++ Compiler

by Justin Lebar

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

GPU computing has gone mainstream. It is a dominant part of the performance landscape, providing the initial 10x performance lift to a wide variety of applications. However, programing for GPUs can be extremely challenging. C++ is rarely available in an unmodified form, and there are few portable and open source approaches available. One of the most popular platforms, CUDA, has no production quality open source implementation. As a consequence, its C++ support has lagged behind and it has been a less appealing area for researchers and others that weren’t comfortable relying on NVIDIA’s tooling.

However, today things are different. Clang is now a fully functional open-source GPU compiler. It provides a CUDA-compatible programming model and can compile most of the awesome CUDA libraries out there ranging from Thrust (the CUDA-enabled parallel algorithms library that gave rise to the new parallelism technical specification) to Eigen and TensorFlow.

In this talk we will give an overview of how LLVM and Clang support targeting C++ to GPUs, how they work to be compatible with existing CUDA code, and how you can build your code today to run on GPUs with this open source compiler.