I was in Bristol last week for the 2018 edition of ACCU. Now is the time for me to give my feedback about the talks, share what I learnt and complain about English food.
I must start by confessing to some ignorance: I didn’t know about ACCU, what they did or how long they’ve been around until last year when somebody asked me if I planned to submit a paper there.
Continue reading ACCU 2018 trip report
on C++
“How should a function handle in-out arguments?” is an old question that still come back from time to time. There’s a lot of advice out there, yet the solutions are still debated. In this post I try my hand at offering an alternative.
A couple weeks ago, Arvid Gerstmann made a (somewhat innocent :D) remark on twitter that sparked some debate:
Continue reading Input-output arguments: reference, pointers or values?
on C++
It may have come as a surprise to some that I moved to C++11 on my day to day job only very recently. One question it often raises is “how can you work without Modern C++?”. In this article I’ll try to defend that Modern C++ has almost nothing to do with C++11, 14 or 17.
In a recent episode of CppCast, Jason Turner asked me to give my perspective on what the life of a C++ developer was in the day to day business. As I explained, my company has been releasing versions of a financial software for more than 30 years now and we only made the move from C++03 to C++11 in the last months.
Continue reading Modern C++ 03
on Build systems, C++
Position-independent code (PIC) and Position-indendendent executables (PIEs) are nothing new, yet they are still a bit obscure compile toggles that you ignore until you can’t. Luckily for my readers, I had too un-ignore them to make things work. Here’s the after action report.
Last week I was stuck chasing an annoying bug. You know the kind: random crash, happens about once every 20 or 30 runs when the CI runs unit tests, can’t be reproduced by hand, doesn’t show-up on Valgrind…
Continue reading PIC, PIE and Sanitizers
on Build systems, C++
Package management and build systems are one of the next big challenges C++ is going to face. In this article series, I offer some thoughts and ideas to solve that. This post is the second part, where we talk about toolchain definition, how a standard could work and what challenges it would face.
Christmas and New Year Eve are that particular part of the year when we wish for impossible things and make unreasonable promises. Get a bottle of a 1999 DRC La Tâche, lose weight, have a C++ ecosystem with a built-in package manager…
Continue reading Simplifying build in C++ (part 2)