Next BeCPP UG Meeting Planned For May 8th, 2014
The next meeting of the Belgian C++ Users Group is planned for Thursday May 8th, 2014 at 18:00 at Materialise HQ.
Materialise ( http://materialise.be/ ) is sponsoring this event by providing the location, drinks and catering
We will have an international speaker for this event: Artur Laksberg.
- Artur Laksberg leads the Visual C++ Libraries development team at Microsoft, responsible for the STL, CRT, C++ AMP, PPL, Casablanca and other libraries. His interests include concurrency, programming language and library design, and modern C++. Artur is one of the co-authors of the ISO C++ proposal on Parallelism (aka Parallel STL) as well as the Concurrency Technical Specification.
If you ever wanted to ask a question to a member of the Visual C++ product team, now is your chance.
The agenda is as follows:
- 18:00: Sandwiches.
- 18:30: Session 1: Parallelism in the Standard C++: What to Expect in C++ 17 (Artur Laksberg) It is 2014 and parallel programming has entered the mainstream. No longer is it the domain of the few highly trained experts. The tools available in the C++ today make parallelism accessible – if not yet easy – to average developers. However, writing efficient cross-platform parallel code in C++ is still hard. The standard constructs available in C++ 11/14 are too basic and too low-level. More advanced tools exist, but most are either vendor-specific or don’t work on all platforms. In this presentation, we’ll talk about the joint effort spearheaded by several members of the ISO C++ Committee to bring parallelism into the C++ Standard Template Library. The project known as the “Parallel STL” aims to bring muliticore and SIMD parallelism into the next revision of the ISO C++ Standard.
- 19:30: Break
- 19:45: Session 2: Asynchronous programming with futures and await (Artur Laksberg) We have to write asynchronous code for a number of reasons, such as making our GUI apps more responsive, or our server code more scalable. Dealing with asynchrony is hard, perhaps harder than parallelism, and doing it in C++ in a portable way is even harder. If you are familiar with the “callback soup”, “control flow inversion” and other such phenomena, you’ve experienced the pain of asynchrony. In this presentation, we’ll look at the state of the art of asynchrony in C++, discuss futures and continuations, await and resumable functions, and how these concepts are making their way to Standard C++.
- 20:45: Guided tour of the Materialise facilities for interested people followed by a drink.
The event is free for everyone, but you need to register for it.
There are 100 seats available for this event.
Note: The deadline for registrations is April 23rd, 2014!
Slides of the 17th of March 2014 BeCPP Meeting
There were around 55 attendees for the Belgian C++ Users Group meeting on 17th of March 2014. Thank you everyone for joining us. We would also like to thank KLA-Tencor / ICOS Belgium for sponsoring the event by providing the location and catering.
If you couldn’t attend the event in person, or if you would like to go over the material again, you can download them below.
Presentation: “What’s new in C++14″ by Peter Van Weert
Presentation: “What’s new in Visual C++ 2013″ by Marc Gregoire
Pictures of the 17th of March 2014 BeCPP Meeting
Here are some pictures of the Belgian C++ Users Group meeting held on 17th of March 2014.
Book “Bonnes pratiques et erreurs à éviter (en C++)”
Recently a new book was released about best practices and errors to avoid in C++. The book is in French.
Here is the French description:
Développer une application peut rapidement devenir un enfer si vous n’avez pas anticipé certaines difficultés et fait les bons choix au moment de sa conception. Ce livre vous aidera à vous poser les bonnes questions et à tirer le meilleur parti de la programmation objet, en particulier en C++, sans tomber dans les pièges les plus fréquents. Il clarifie certains concepts délicats et passe en revue un ensemble de bonnes pratiques, qui rendront vos projets plus évolutifs et plus faciles à maintenir.
Organisé en quatre parties, il traite successivement :
•des principes de base qui devraient être respectés quel que soit le langage de programmation ou le paradigme utilisé ;
•des fondements de la programmation orientée objet et des principes qui sont applicables en toutes circonstances dès lors qu’on utilise ce paradigme ;
•des principes spécifiques au C++ ;pour se terminer sur une étude de cas approfondie détaillant les différentes étapes de conception d’un jeu d’échecs en conformité avec les principes énoncés précédemment. L’annexe vous apporte quelques compléments sur des aspects transversaux tels que la compilation ou les outils d’aide au développement.
Announcing Meeting C++ 2014
The Meeting C++ 2014 conference has been announced. After last years great success, we will meet again for 2 days full of C++ in Germany this Fall: Meeting C++ 2014 will be at the 1st weekend of December (5./6.12.2014). This year the conference will move to Berlin!
Like last year, this event is organized independently, covering most its costs over the ticket sales. There will be again 3 Tracks about C++ this year, with the 3rd track being a theme track about “Scientific Programming in C++”. The other two tracks will offer general C++ talks like last year.
Read the official announcement here.
Call for papers.
Next BeCPP UG Meeting Planned For March 17th, 2014
The next meeting of the Belgian C++ Users Group is planned for Monday March 17th, 2014 at 18:00 at KLA-Tencor / ICOS Belgium.
KLA-Tencor / ICOS Belgium ( http://kla-tencor.com/ ) is sponsoring this event by providing the location, drinks and catering.
The agenda is as follows:
- 18:00: Sandwiches.
- 18:30: Session 1: What’s new in C++14 (Peter Van Weert)
An overview of the new features in the latest C++14 standard. - 19:30: Break
- 19:45: Session 2: What’s new in Visual C++ 2013 (Marc Gregoire)
An overview of the new features in Visual C++ 2013 and the Visual C++ 2013 November CTP. - 20:45: Short technically oriented presentation by the host KLA-Tencor / ICOS Belgium.
- 21:00: Drink.
The event is free for everyone, but you need to register for it.
There are 50 seats available for this event.
Note: The deadline for registrations is March 8th, 2014!
Slides of the 4th of November 2013 BeCPP Meeting
The Belgian C++ Users Group meeting on 4th of November 2013 was again a great success. There were around 35 attendees. Thank you everyone for joining us. We would also like to thank LMS International, a Siemens Business for sponsoring the event by providing the location and catering.
If you couldn’t attend the event in person, or if you would like to go over the material again, you can download them below.
Presentation: “String Handling” by Lieven de Cock
You can also download all the source code that was shown during the presentation from here.
Pictures of the 4th of November 2013 BeCPP Meeting
Here are some pictures of the Belgian C++ Users Group meeting held on 4th of November 2013.
Know your tools: speed comparison between C++ compilers
As compilers continuously evolve, developers have new expectations on compilation speed, generated code performance and standards compliance.
Slashdot has published their own benchmarks that pit Intel C++, G++ and LLVM Clang against each other. The benchmark is tailored to modern C++ development needs and involves code using both the TBB and the Cilk Plus parallel processing libraries. Quite a bit of template heavy metaprogramming code has also been included to test the compilation time performance. In total, over 6000 lines of code have been fed to each compiler.
The results? They might just surprise you. Read all about them here.
Source: slashdot.org
Visual Studio 2013 Available for Download
The final versions of Visual Studio 2013, Team Foundation Server 2013 and .NET 4.51 are now available from MSDN. You can also download trials.
VS 2013 can be installed side by side with previous versions of Visual Studio or, if you have a VS 2013 pre-release, it can be installed straight on top of the pre-release. TFS 2013 cannot be installed side by side but can also be installed on top of either a previous version (TFS 2012 or TFS 2010) or a pre-release.
Learn more about what’s new in Visual Studio 2013.
What’s new in Visual C++ 2013 (excerpt from MSDN):
- Compiler
- Added support for the following ISO C++11 language features:
- Default template arguments for function templates.
- Delegating constructors.
- Explicit conversion operators.
- Initializer lists and uniform initialization.
- Raw string literals.
- Variadic templates.
- Alias templates.
- Deleted functions.
- Non-static data member initializers (NSDMIs).
- Defaulted functions. (using =default to request memberwise move constructors and move assignment operators is not supported)
- Added support for the following ISO C99 language features:
- _Bool
- Compound literals.
- Designated initializers.
- Mixing declarations with code.
- String literal conversion to modifiable values can be disallowed by using the new compiler option /Zc:strictStrings. In C++98, conversion from string literals to char * (and wide string literals to wchar_t *) was deprecated. In C++11, the conversion was removed entirely. Although the compiler could strictly conform to the standard, instead it provides the /Zc:strictStrings option so that you can control conversion. By default, the option is off. Note that when you are using this option in debug mode, the STL will not compile.
- rvalue/lvalue Reference Casts. With rvalue references, C++11 can clearly distinguish between lvalues and rvalues. Previously, the Visual C++ compiler did not provide this in specific casting scenarios. A new compiler option, /Zc:rvalueCast, has been added to make the compiler conformant with the C++ Language Working Paper(see section 5.4, [expr.cast]/1). The default behavior when this option is not specified is the same as in Visual Studio 2012.
- Added support for the following ISO C++11 language features:
- STL
- Support for the C++11 explicit conversion operators, initializer lists, scoped enums, and variadic templates.
- All containers now support the C++11 fine-grained element requirements.
- Support for these C++14 features:
- “Transparent operator functors” less<>, greater<>, plus<>, multiplies<>, and so on.
- make_unique<T>(args…) and make_unique<T[]>(n)
- cbegin()/cend(), rbegin()/rend(), and crbegin()/crend() non-member functions.
- <atomic> received numerous performance enhancements.
- <type_traits> received major stabilization and code fixes.
This list is just a small part of everything that’s new. There are also
- Visual C++ library enhancements
- C++ application performance enhancements
- Diagnostics enhancements
- 3D graphics enhancements
- Quite a few very nice IDE and Productivity enhancements.
Visual C++ 2013 now also supports “just my code” debugging which makes working with C++ even better. The ability to filter the call stack down to just the code you wrote when debugging has long existed for managed languages and is now available for C++ 