C++Now

C++Now 2024 - Tony Van Eerd: "Value Oriented Programming Part V - Return of the Values" youtu.be/sc1guyo5Rso At the very first C++Now (aka BoostCon 2007), Sean Parent gave the Best. Keynote. Ever. Introducing many to Value Semantics. Some (who are probably reading this) said it fundamentally changed how they code. During the questions at the end, Dave Abrahams asked "how do we teach this". We are trying Dave, we are trying. "Value Oriented Programming" is the new thing. As opposed to Object Oriented Programming, obviously. But what is it? It is actually somewhat less about Values vs Objects, but more about the "Oriented" part. A class, or even an int, can be treated "value-y" or "object-y", but the goal (we will see) is to more often favour an orientation towards value semantics. We will look at how to make your types lean towards values, and how to make your code and functions treat your types like values. We will cover Intrinsics, Extrinsics, Invariants, and more! The goal is improved code readability, correctness, maintainability, testability, and maybe even performance. P.S. yeah, I know, the episode number should be VI... --- Tony Van Eerd has been coding for well over 25 years, and hopefully coding well for most of that. Previously at Inscriber, Adobe, and BlackBerry, he now enables painting with light at Christie Digital. He is on the C++ Committee. He is a Ninja and a Jedi.

C++Now - Ben Deane: "Embedded Asynchronous Abstraction C++ - Implementing Senders & Receivers Without an OS" youtu.be/eI5b-q4K9vo?t=5 You've probably heard about senders and receivers. They're this new (actually old, but new to C++) abstraction for asynchronous work. People who work on them tend to be concerned with large-scale heterogeneous computing: parallel algorithms for doing "AI" and such. But if you're working in embedded or constrained systems, and you want abstraction, what do you do? You have concurrency problems in spades since you're basically event-driven by interrupts happening whenever. Can you use senders and receivers make this situation amenable to reason with zero abstraction cost? This talk answers that question, and more. We'll talk about the nitty-gritty of how senders and receivers work, and specifically about a partial implementation of P2300 targeting embedded microcontrollers. What's good about the current paper, and where is it lacking? Just what the heck are these things, and can we understand an implementation without drowning in abstract C++ noise? Can we express concurrent behaviour safely on systems without exceptions, allocation, or half the library that standardization takes for granted? Let's find out. --- Ben Deane has been programming in C++ for this whole millennium. He spent just over 20 years in the games industry working for companies like EA and Blizzard; many of the games he worked on used to be fondly remembered but now he’s accepted that they are probably mostly forgotten. After getting more interested in modern C++, in the teens he started giving internal company talks and then talks at various conferences, spreading ideas about types, algorithms and declarative and functional techniques. In 2018 he left the games industry and worked in finance for a short spell, writing high-frequency trading platforms using the most modern C++ that compilers could support. Now he is a Principal Engineer at Intel where he puts monads inside your CPU.

C++Now 2024 - Fedor Pikus - "C++ Type Erasure Demystified" youtu.be/p-qaf6OS_f4 This talk is about type erasure in C++ (I have to be specific because the term has a completely different meaning in other languages). The aim of this talk is to explain how type erasure works, and do it in a very simple and clear way. Type erasure is probably the closest C++ comes to “and then magic happens.” It’s a technique used to write a program (in a strictly typed language, no less) that doesn’t mention the types it works with. It is the pinnacle of abstraction in C++, and, like most abstractions, it’s much easier to show what that looks like than to define it: most concise definitions of type erasure are circular. So we will begin the talk by demonstrating what the code looks like after the magic happens. Then comes the biggest letdown of all time: I’ll show the basic technique that type erasure relies on. It’s very simple, it’s very familiar, it predates C++, and every implementation of type erasure uses it. After that, we learn three basic ways to implement type erasure. There are several great type erasure libraries out there, you should use them if you just want to get stuff done. I’m going to strip them down to the bare minimum to show the essence of each implementation as clearly as possible. Along the way, we will learn how vtables are implemented. Finally, we will measure and compare the performance of the different implementations of type erasure. Type erasure is easy to implement; fast type erasure is not really any harder to implement, but it relies on some subtle details I’m going to demonstrate (including how to make std::function 50% faster). Whether you want to write your own implementation or use an existing library, by the end of this talk the type erasure will no longer be shrouded in a mystic aura for you. --- Fedor G Pikus is a Technical Fellow and head of the Advanced Projects Team in Siemens Digital Industries Software. His responsibilities include planning the long-term technical direction of Calibre products, directing and training the engineers who work on these products, design, and architecture of the software, and researching new design and software technologies. His earlier positions included a Chief Scientist at Mentor Graphics (acquired by Siemens Software), a Senior Software Engineer at Google, and a Chief Software Architect for Calibre PERC, LVS, and DFM at Mentor Graphics. He joined Mentor Graphics in 1998 when he made a switch from academic research in computational physics to the software industry. Fedor is a recognized expert in high-performance computing and C++. He is the author of two books on C++ and software design, has presented his works at CPPNow, CPPCon, SD West, DesignCon, and in software development journals, and is also an O'Reilly author. Fedor has over 30 patents and over 100 papers and conference presentations on physics, EDA, software design, and C++ language.

C++Now 2024 - Saksham Sharma: "Reflection Is Good for C++ Code Health" youtu.be/GQ5HKL0WRGQ The primary reason for your code to get bored is fatigue from repetitive instructions. You write down enums, but then you also have to write their stringified version, and you also have to write a function to map the strings to the enums. You write down a class, but you have to expose every method / member in the class separately to be able to bind your class to a Python program (for example). Reflection is (potentially / hopefully) showing up for C++26, having already been forwarded from the SG7 subgroup on reflection / compile time programming to the LEWG and EWG. This talk will discuss everything there is so far on reflection, and we will lead up to three library ideas based on reflection: Python bindings ABI hashing (hashing a type for efficient compatibility checking) A better std::any variant type with duck typing :) View this talk if you'd like to hear about cool new library possibilities that have opened up with reflection! For background, we will look at a little bit of context and how reflection works in some other languages, and will explore how the P2996R1 paper’s proposed version of reflection looks in practice, with some real use-case inspired code. --- Saksham Sharma is a Director of Quantitative Research Technology at Tower Research Capital LLC, a high frequency trading firm based out of New York. He develops low latency and high throughput trading systems and strategies used for the firm's global quantitative trading. In addition, he also helps design and improve big data research infrastructure used for trading research using a combination of C++ and Python. Thanks to an urge to optimize his daily workflow, he also owns the build systems, tooling, and package managers for C++ within his team. In the past, he has worked in the fields of program analysis research, functional programming, and systems security. He is a reformed geek (exemplified by a switch to VSCode after almost a decade with Emacs), and now enjoys driving, guitar, badminton, and snowboarding.

C++Now 2024 - Cassio Neri: "Fast Conversion From Cpp Floating Point Numbers" youtu.be/w0WrRdW7eqg Standard C++ provides a few functions to convert a double or float value to string, namely, sprintf, stringstream::operator<<, snprintf, to_string, to_chars and format. This talk concerns what goes on behind the scenes, i.e, the algorithms which these functions might use to do their job. Curiously, many of these algorithms have dragon-related names like Dragon, Grisu, Errol, Ryu and Dragonbox. Here mythology meets technology and we shall introduce the new dragon that has just arrived in the den. (Please leave your bows and arrows at home, they won't be necessary here.) The following topics are some of those covered in this presentation:- algorithms, mathematics, arithmetic, floating point, floating point numbers, floating point math, floating point arithmetic, decimal floating-point representation, binary floating-point representation, IEEE 754, programming languages, c++, cpp --- Cassio Neri holds a PhD in Applied Mathematics from University of Paris Dauphine. He has been professionally coding in C++ for more than 17 years but his coding experience has started when he was 11. He currently works on the financial industry in London but has previously worked as a lecture of Mathematics for more than a decade. Cassio has authored a few research articles and has published them on peer-reviewed journals on Mathematics (there's an equation named after him), Finance, Computer Science and C++.

C++Now 2024 Robert Leahy: "An Adventure in Modern C++ Library Design" youtu.be/W29fY7Ml4-w Library design used to seem easy: Model the problem domain with classes which sometimes inherit from one another, throw in a few free functions, and you’re done. Modern library design is unrecognizable from that frame of reference: Customization point objects, expression equivalence, perfect forwarding, a seemingly-endless list of edge cases and sharp edges understood only by experts. This journey from simple to complicated didn’t occur without reason. Putting complexity into libraries transfers that complexity into a single place where it can be dealt with once. Improving genericity by considering and handling edge cases and seemingly-obscure use cases furthers the concentration of complexity by increasing the reach and leverage of C++ libraries. This talk will explore modern C++ library design principles using the real-world example of a library which interfaces with a time series database. CPOs and generic algorithms form the foundation of this C++ library. Sophisticated uses of std::variant, CTAD, and immovable types will be introduced. Attendees will gain actionable insights into designing modern C++ libraries to address complex software engineering challenges. --- Robert Leahy is a graduate of the University of Victoria where he specialized in graphics, gaming, and digital geometry processing. After spending 4.5 years in full stack web development he pivoted to financial infrastructure in early 2016 and now works on next generation market data storage and retrieval mechanisms. In 2019 he became involved in the ISO C++ committee with a particular focus on library evolution.

C++Now 2024 Michael Caisse Keynote: "Employing Senders & Receivers to Tame Concurrency in C++ Embedded Systems" youtu.be/wHmvszK8WCE Concurrency and asynchronicity are notoriously hard in baremetal systems which often provide few abstractions. One core, a few interrupt driven events, and communication that may produce errors or require cancellation and now we have a concurrency beast. Typical approaches range from ignoring the problem to inefficient and hard to maintain implementations. Senders and Receivers offers much in the solution space but is it the silver bullet we have wanted? This talk shows how to use the Senders and Receivers pattern to solve increasingly more complex problems. We will use Intel's open source baremetal senders and receivers library as well as other open source packages to build elegant, declarative solutions to historically complex problems. Our target will be an ARM based development board controlling several devices. While this talk is focused on concurrency in the embedded baremetal domain, the problems addressed and solutions showcased are applicable to many areas. Please join me as we explore how Senders and Receivers can be employed to tame the concurrency beast in event driven systems. --- Michael Caisse started using C++ with embedded systems in 1990. He continues to be passionate about combing his degree in Electrical Engineering with elegant software solutions and is always excited to share his discoveries with others. Michael is a Principal Engineer at Intel where he works with a talented team putting magic into silicon. When he isn't fighting with compilers or robots, he enjoys fencing with a sabre.

C++Now 2024 Aaron Jacobs: "C++ Coroutines at Scale - Implementation Choices at Google" youtu.be/k-A12dpMYHo Please Like, Follow, & Share: C++Now Google is now using C++ coroutines to process billions of requests per second. This talk presents trade-offs and novel choices made in developing our coroutines library, and integrating it into the Google production environment. The talk covers both performance and semantic questions that affect usability and software engineering at scale. Topics include: - The importance of mandatory support for cancellation. - Library and compiler support making it feasible to safely accept reference parameters in coroutines. - The benefits and limitations of structured concurrency APIs. - Unifying deadlines and cancellation. - Stack-efficient async programming, including techniques for stack-efficient cancellation, and where the language is still missing features. - Trade-offs between API usability and bounded parallelism executors. - Propagation of "context" information like tracing and security credentials. - Using coroutines to improve the usability of APIs for making and receiving streaming RPCs. --- Aaron Jacobs is a senior staff software engineer who has been at Google since 2008. He has worked on several large storage systems, and is particularly interested in async programming in C++. Outside of work he holds a private pilot license with aerobatics and spinning endorsements, and enjoys turning light airplanes upside down.

C++Now 2024 David Olsen: "C++ Reflection - Back on Track" youtu.be/nBUgjFPkoto C++ reflection has been a long-sought goal of users and language designers. But previous attempts have failed to get wide enough support to make it into the C++ standard or be widely implemented. A newly revised design has incorporated the lessons learned from previous proposals and is gaining momentum in the C++ standards committee. This presentation will cover the current reflection proposal. I will go over how it works, how to use it, and how it compares to other reflection proposals and implementations. There will be plenty of code examples, compiled by real compilers that have already implemented the proposal, showing how reflection enables useful techniques that had been previously out of reach. Attendees will come away from this session with an appreciation for the power and usefulness of reflection, and with the knowledge of how to start writing reflection-based code. --- David Olsen has three decades of software development experience in a variety of programming languages and development environments. For the last seven years he has been the lead engineer for the NVIDIA HPC C++ compiler, focusing on running standard parallel algorithms on GPUs. He is a member of the ISO C++ committee, where he was the champion for the extended floating-point feature in C++23.

As many who follow me know, last year I gave a talk at C++Now and C++ on Sea titled "Speeding Date: Implementing Fast Calendar Algorithms." When trying to find the recordings on YouTube I searched for "Speeding Date" and now the site "thinks" that I'm looking for women to date and shows me recommendations for this matter. 🤦🏻♂️ (Be careful with jokes in the age of AI.) To save you from such embarrassment, the links follow. C++ Now : https://lnkd.in/ePzZXrb5 C++ on Sea : https://lnkd.in/ewe3tyDf