Abstract:

You can't do a better job if you don't change what you're doing, but change is hard.  It's especially hard when what needs to change is your colleagues' approach to software development. Moving your team forward often requires persuading your peers to change their behavior, sometimes to do something they're not doing, other times to stop doing something they've become accustomed to.  Whether the issue is to embrace or avoid C++ language features, to adopt new development tools or abandon old ones, to increase use of or scale back on overuse of design patterns, to adhere to coding standards, or any of the plethora of other matters that affect software creation, moving things forward typically requires getting your colleagues to buy into the change you're proposing.  But how can you do that?

In this panel session, Andrei, Herb, and Scott share how they go about convincing their colleagues to change and take questions from the audience. 

From Scott's recently published article in the October 2012 edition of ACCU's Overload:

Given that rvalue references are declared using "&&", it seems reasonable to assume that the presence of "&&" in a type declaration indicates an rvalue reference. That is not the case:

Widget&& var1 = someWidget; // here, "&&" means rvalue reference

auto&& var2 = var1; // here, "&&" does not mean rvalue reference

template<typename T>

void f(std::vector<T>&& param); // here, "&&" means rvalue reference

template<typename T>

void f(T&& param); // here, "&&" does not mean rvalue reference

In this article, I describe the two meanings of "&&" in type declarations, explain how to tell them apart, and introduce new terminology that makes it possible to unambiguously communicate which meaning of "&&" is intended. Distinguishing the different meanings is important, because if you think "rvalue reference" whenever you see "&&" in a type declaration, you'll misread a lot of C++11 code.

Tune in. Scott's an incredible presenter and it's well worth your time to both read his article and watch his presentation on the subject. Great stuff!

Download slides

Andrei Alexandrescu, Scott Meyers and Herb Sutter take questions from attendees. As expected, great questions and answers!

Tune in!

Table of contents (click the time codes ([xx:xx]) to hear the answers...):

Message passing primitives in future versions of the standard... [00:00]
Standardized unit testing framework... [02:55]
std::async... [04:30]
Standard modules proposal... [08:14]
Keyword additions and the standard library... [09:35]
Problems (and solutions) with exceptions... [12:50]
Future of concepts... [22:34]
std::thread and thread interruption... [23:03]
When to use the auto keyword (and when not to...)... [25:03]
More on auto (benefits of reduncancy, type conversion issues with bool to int?)... [29:31]
const and multithreaded programming, in C++11 const means thread safe, too... [35:00]
Yet more on auto (impact on rampant use and code readability/comprehension)... [42:42]
Compiler type deduction information (compiler switch that prints out auto deduced type information)... [50:18]
Printing out code for review that replaces auto with the actual type... [53:30]
auto and dynamic memory allocation... [54:59]
Useful, broadly-used concurrency libraries... [57:00]

Make sure to check out all the C&B 2011 content we're lucky enough to have on C9

Enjoy! Learn! Go native!

Table of Contents (click on the time links to jump directly to the question/topic referenced):

[00:10] On strings, UTF-8 vs UTF-16, etc...
[03:08] How does the ISO C++ standards committee work?
[04:34] On shared_ptr performance and correctness
[11:30] What C++ work do you guys do outside of your real jobs?
[14:51] Implementations of atomic...
[17:07] Memory consistency model...
[22:13] Favorite C++11 features...
[24:23] What's next for the standard's committee?
[25:55] How to convince your company it's OK to use templates now (C++11)...
[28:30] Favorite feature that's not in the C++11 standard...
[30:44] What's the deal with systematic and principled thread termination and program termination?
[36:22] Concepts...
[36:55] What's going on with constexpr?
[41:51] When will we see Effective/Exceptional C++ books for C++11?

Make sure to check out all the C&B 2011 content we're lucky enough to have stored on C9

Enjoy! Learn!

Table of contents (click on the time code link to move the player to that point in time...):

[00:00] Using multiple cores for useful work...
[01:56] Does C++AMP build on PPL?
[02:48] What about operating system scheduling for GPU operations?
[03:49] Transition from platform-specific memory models to a standard(ized) C++ memory model (C++11's MM, to be specific...).
[06:41] Is there a performance penalty associated with a standard C++ memory model?
[09:18] What about functional languages/techniques (with respect to parallel and concurrent programming)?
[15:44] Which performance pitfalls we may pitfall into?
[16:13] What about the work on ranges and wouldn't they help parallelism?
[20:34] Fortran arrays have things like slices and strides. What about C++AMP?
[22:42] Parallel debugging...
[23:30] How baked is C++AMP?
[25:26] On SIMD and MIMD...
[34:20] Computation-following-data versus data-following-computation...

Enjoy! Learn!

Table of contents (click on the time code link to move the player to that point in time...):

[00:19] When should new C++11 features be adopted in production?
[09:28] C++11 Memory Model
[15:23] Which C++11 features remain broadly missing?
[16:25] When can we expect full C++11 conformance from the major compilers?
[19:45] -> Herb Sutter asks YOU a question (please answer on this thread): What do you want the standards committee to work on next? Should they immediately start work on new features? Should they take a break before new feature work?
[21:45] What about debugging, linking and tools - as it relates to C++11?
[23:56] What really happened to Concepts?
[29:07] Will existing code have to be changed just to compile with a new C++11 conforming compiler?
[29:38] Why was a seemlingly complicated feature (to implement) like variadic templates rolled out sooner than a seemingly simple feature like templated typedefs?
[32:42] What do you think we'll get wrong most often when using C++11 features?
[45:13] Return by ref or by value - is there a universal rule of thumb?
[48:32] Why don't lambdas have typedefs for argument types?
[53:02] How do you capture enclosing scope variables when using lambdas?

Andrei Alexandrescu is the co-designer of the D programming language, technical author and research scientist at Facebook. He is also one of the world's C++ (and D...) template masters. His talk on PBD (policy based design) incorporated the mind bending use of variadic variadic template templates. As Gilad Bracha says, learning is brain damage.Thanks for the headache, Andrei!

Scott Meyers is one of the most respected C++ practioners in the industry. He is the author of Effective C++, More Effective C++, and Effective STL. Scott's talks on the C++11 Memory Model and Perfect Forwarding were outstanding. I wish we could post them here

Herb Sutter runs the C++11 ISO committee and is one of the world's leading C++ authorities. Congratulations to Herb and the rest of the people involved with pushing the language forward on the recent ratification of the C++11 international standard (treaty)! Herb's also Microsoft's architect for native programming languages, with an emphasis on C++. We'll find out here what Herb thinks of D.

Much thanks to Scott, Andrei and Herb for allowing me to randomize them right after the event ended to film this conversation. We spend a fair amount of time exploring the Beyond part of the equation. I know Niners will be extremely pleased to see three C++ titans appearing on C9 at the same time! Excellent.

Highlights:

[00:00] Event debriefing

[01:38] Scott on C++ developers

[03:18] Modern C++

[04:17] Why D, Andrei? 

[17:25] What problems does D solve that C++ can't?

[22:03] C++ and D interoperability (COM is old, but COM is good!)

[24:22] C++11 and Beyond

[26:01] Herb, ISO C++ Committee's next phase - what are you going to do?

[28:22] Scott, Andrei and Herb share perspectives on the ISO standards process, philosophies of language design, what C++ gets wrong, what it gets right

[49:48] Perspectives on this year's event and if/when C++ and Beyond will happen again

Tune in. Enjoy.

PS: If you can attend the next C++ and Beyond, whenever it may happen, I can't recommend it highly enough. Go. Follow @cppandbeyond to get updates and info on when/where the three amigos will get together again.