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CppCon 2016: Instruction Re-ordering Everywhere: The C++ ‘As-If’ Rule and the Role…—Charles Bay

By Adrien Hamelin | Aug 21, 2017 11:58 AM | Tags: performance

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:

Instruction Re-ordering Everywhere: The C++ 'As-If' Rule and the Role of Sequence

by Charles Bay

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

This is an introductory (i.e., "First Principles") dive into instruction re-ordering (at compile-time, and at run-time) due to conspiring by the compiler and CPU to make most efficient use of execution units and resources within the CPU processor core. Discussion is made of the role for sequence, for tracing of data flows and control flows, how "out-of-order" execution occurs within the compiler and CPU, and why that's a "good thing". The importance of the C++ "As-If" rule that allows these optimizations is explained.

Exploration is made of imperative versus sequential devices, physical versus logical sequences, and the role of the CPU cache line. At the end of this talk, it will be obvious for how and why instruction re-ordering occurs, and the programmer's need to consider logical dependencies (and not instruction order) when defining algorithms.

This talk is ideal for any programmer confused after observing instruction reordering in their running systems, and provides a solid basis to begin reasoning about how to leverage parallelism and be concerned with concurrency.

CppCon 2016: Regular Expressions in C++, Present and Future—Tim Shen

By Adrien Hamelin | Aug 18, 2017 11:59 AM | Tags: efficiency advanced

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:

Regular Expressions in C++, Present and Future

by Tim Shen

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

Regular expressions are widely used in application development and data processing, yet it is challenging to design and implement a regular expression library that is expressive, efficient and safe.

In this talk, Tim Shen, the current maintainer of libstdc++'s ＜regex＞, will introduce the basics of implementing regular expressions in C++, the status of existing implementations, and what is expected from the standardization process.

For the implementation, several data structures and algorithms will be introduced, with pros and cons listed; we will show how several popular implementations (Boost.Regex, Boost.Xpressive, ＜regex＞ from standard library implementations, RE2, etc) pick their algorithms. Several popular features/patterns that hurt performance will be explained, with a "safe" regex usage suggested. Finally a wishlist of features will be presented, in order to deliver a more efficient and usable regex library.

CppCast Episode 114: Building Debuggers and Keyboards with Simon Brand

By robwirving | Aug 18, 2017 10:18 AM | Tags: None

Episode 114 of CppCast the only podcast for C++ developers by C++ developers. In this episode Rob and Jason are joined by Simon Brand from Codeplay Software to talk about building C++ debuggers and the hardware and C++ firmware of a custom keyboard.

CppCast Episode 114: Building Debuggers and Keyboards with Simon Brand

About the interviewee:

Simon is a GPGPU toolchain developer at Codeplay Software in Edinburgh. He turns into a metaprogramming fiend every full moon, when he can be found bringing compilers to their knees with template errors and debating undefined behaviour on the C++ Slack channel. He co-organises the Edinburgh C++ user group and contributes to various programming standards bodies.

Outside of programming, he enjoys experimental films, homebrewing, and board games.

Video: C++ Concepts TS and Request for Input—everythingcpp

By rwdougla | Aug 15, 2017 07:09 AM | Tags: c++20

This video teaches the Concepts syntax and motivation, with a request for viewers to try it out for themselves, to submit back their usage, to help guide a paper for the upcoming Albuquerque meeting.

C++ Concepts Intro: Need Your Input

by everythingcpp

From the article:

C++20 is slated to add most of the contents of the Concepts Technical Specification. Concerns about teach/learn-ability and usage preferences has kept some features from going in. This video covers introductory material on Concepts in C++ as it is in the technical specification. Afterward, I would like to hear from you!

CppCon 2016: A modern database interface for C++—Erik Smith

By Adrien Hamelin | Aug 14, 2017 02:44 PM | Tags: 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:

A modern database interface for C++

by Erik Smith

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

C++ has historically had many options for database connectivity but has lacked a standard interface that other languages, such as Java, have had for a long time. This talk will present a standards grade interface along with experience with a reference implementation that includes support for at least 6 databases. A key aspect of the design is to show how modern C++ features can be used to achieve a high degree of both efficiency and ease-of-use. Specific features to be covered will include type conversion, connection pooling, I/O binding for scalars and arrays, row sets, direct/polymorphic interfaces, policy based design, the driver interface, and details on the implementation. Forward looking standards proposals, such as ranges and variants, will also be included in the discussion.

CppCon 2016: Turning Particle-Astro-Physicist-Hackers into Software Engineers—Alex Olivas

By Adrien Hamelin | Aug 11, 2017 03:18 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:

Turning Particle-Astro-Physicist-Hackers into Software Engineers

by Alex Olivas

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

Want to increase software literacy in your organization? In this talk I'll present programs I've developed over the last year to teach C++ software engineering principles to graduate students and postdocs on the IceCube South Pole Neutrino Observatory. I believe similar programs could be beneficial to all types of organizations, from scientific collaborations to professional software shops.

IceCube is a kilometer-scale high energy neutrino observatory located deep in the Antarctic ice at the geographic South Pole. IceCube studies physics in energy regimes ranging from the most energetic processes in the visible universe (several orders of magnitude greater than the collision energies at the Large Hadron Collider), to dark matter detection at the 100 GeV scale. It is a relatively large collaboration, consisting of roughly 300 physicists and engineers from 48 institutions from a dozen different countries. IceCube has been collecting data for over 11 years (going into our 6th season with the fully completed detector) and is expected to run for at least another decade.

Many large scientific projects, which often run for decades, rely on code developed by hackers, who's focus and passion is rarely software engineering. Their primary passion, understandably, is the field for which they found themselves writing code. To make matters worse, the amount of work and focus required to secure a career in their chosen field often leaves little time and energy to devote to honing the skills needed to develop production quality code. Many students and postdocs often have, at best, a cursory understanding of the programming language(s) that comprise the experiment's codebase.

C++ has become the primary programming language for High Energy Physics (HEP) and will likely continue to be for decades to come. Consider, for example, that ROOT, GEANT, and Pythia to name a few critical HEP libraries are written in C++. Over the last year on IceCube, I've developed several comprehensive internal training programs in an attempt to bridge the gap between the scientist-hacker and the professional C++ software engineer. In this session I'd like to present the challenges I've encountered over the last year and my plans for extending these programs to the High Energy Physics community through the HEP Software Foundation.

CppCast Episode 113: Synchronization Primitives with Samy Bahra

By robwirving | Aug 11, 2017 08:17 AM | Tags: None

Episode 113 of CppCast the only podcast for C++ developers by C++ developers. In this episode Rob and Jason are joined by Samy Bahra from Backtrace to talk about lesser known synchronization primitives and his work on the Concurrency Kit.

CppCast Episode 113: Synchronization Primitives with Samy Bahra

by Rob Irving and Jason Turner

About the interviewee:

Samy Al Bahra is the cofounder of Backtrace, where he is helping build a modern debugging platform for today’s complex applications. Prior to Backtrace, Samy was a principal engineer at AppNexus, where he played a lead role in the architecture and development of many mission-critical components of the ecosystem. His work at AppNexus was instrumental in scaling the system to 18 billion impressions with orders of magnitude in efficiency improvements. Prior to AppNexus, Samy was behind major performance improvements to the core technology at Message Systems. At the George Washington University High Performance Computing Laboratory, Samy worked on the UPC programming language, heterogeneous computing, and multicore synchronization. Samy is also the founder of the Concurrency Kit project, which several leading technology companies rely on for scalability and performance. Samy serves on the ACM Queue Editorial Board.