Entries tagged with stl - Channel 9

Stephan T. Lavavej: Everything you ever wanted to know about nullptr

Charles — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:39:00 GMT

In C++, 0 is an abused integer. It is used to reflect, well, 0 as a value of type int and it is also used to represent a null pointer... The latter has led to many bugs and confusion over the past 30 years. Put simply, using 0 is and has always been a bad idea (then there's the NULL macro...). Well, my friends, today, with the release of Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 and the updated C++ language, compilers and libraries that come with it, the abuse of 0 comes to an end: Introducing nullptr the rvalue constant that actually is a null pointer literal.

Who better to dig deep into nullptr (and a few other topics of related interest and importance) than the great and gifted Stephan T. Lavavej? Stephen is a C++ expert and library author who you've met before a few times on C9. Sit back, relax and learn everything you ever wanted to know about nullptr. Thank you, Stephen, for the awesome lesson!

Enjoy!

VC Team Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/vcblog/default.aspx

VC 10: Stephan T. Lavavej and Damien Watkins - Inside STL

Charles — Thu, 21 May 2009 15:43:00 GMT

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 introduces a number of exciting new features for the C++ developer as we include a selection of goodies from the upcoming C++0x Standard. We have already heard about many of the language improvements (auto, decltype, lambdas, rvalue references, …) all of which can be put to good use when using the Standard Template Library (STL). Here, Visual C++ team members who work on the STL – Stephan (Dev), Damien (PM) and a cameo appearance by Usman (QA) – Usman works in our Canadian Development Center and unfortunately could not be onsite for the video - tell us all about the latest version of STL. We talk about how the language features are enabling many improvements to the STL, with performance being a big beneficiary. To realize these benefits we needed to update our STL implementation to leverage these new techniques, for example adding “move” semantics to STL containers. Additionally when users of our STL implementation add “move” semantics to their types that they store in our STL containers then we hook into these as well.

Learn more:

http://blogs.msdn.com/vcblog/archive/2009/04/22/decltype-c-0x-features-in-vc10-part-3.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/vcblog/archive/2009/02/03/rvalue-references-c-0x-features-in-vc10-part-2.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/vcblog/archive/2008/10/28/lambdas-auto-and-static-assert-c-0x-features-in-vc10-part-1.aspx

We did also mention lambdas, decltype, auto (and C++0x, generally) in a C9 PCP video from a while back:

http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going+Deep/Parallel-Computing-in-Native-Code-New-Trends-and-Old-Friends/

STL Iterator Debugging and Secure SCL

Charles — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 17:28:00 GMT

The Visual C++ runtime library now detects incorrect iterator use and will assert and display a dialog box at run time. To enable debug iterator support, a program must be compiled with a debug version of a C run time library (see C Run-Time Libraries for more information).

See Checked Iterators for more information on using iterators.

The C++ standard describes which member functions cause iterators to a container to become invalid. Two examples are:

Erasing an element from a container causes iterators to the element to become invalid.
Increasing the size of a vector (push or insert) causes iterators into the vector container become invalid.

Here, VC++ Software Engineer Stephan T. Lavavej digs into the details of STL Iterator Debugging including its implementation, usage scenarios and interesting facts you may not find anywhere else (Channel 9 goodness). Stephan is known as STL (this is his name's acronym, by coincidence or perhaps it's simply prophetic since Stephan is a passionate advocate for STL, as you will no doubt understand after watching and listening to this conversation). Stephan also dives a bit into Secure SCL, which is part of the VC++ Safe Libraries.

Stephan does not possess a marketing bone in his body as you can tell by his commentary that's weaved into his informal presentation of advanced topics. I love this. He speaks his mind freely, though with fairness, and that's the only way to be.

Enjoy!