Dr. Dobb's Journal - February 2008 - (Page 42)

SD WEST 2008 CONFERENCE & EXPO STROUSTRUP & SUTTER ON C++ DAY 1: MONDAY, MARCH 3 C++0x Overview Monday, March 3 | 8:30 AM – 10:00 AM Bjarne Stroustrup We now know the expected contents of the next C++ Standard, which is targeted to be feature-complete in mid-2008 with final text in 2009. This presentation articulates the main principles of the design of C++0x, outlines the ISO C++ standards process, summarizes the new features and libraries, and gives key examples using new features. Major features, such as concepts, the memory model, and major libraries (such as threads and regular expression matching) are covered by other tutorials, so they will be only briefly mentioned here. The focus of this presentation is the various "minor" features, such as the unified initializer syntax (including variable length initializer lists), decltype and the new form of auto, template aliases, nullptr, generalized constant expressions, "strong" enumerations, the new for statement, static assertions, and rvalue references. But a language is far more than a mere list of features: My aim is to show how these features fit together and fit with C++98 features to better support programming techniques. As ever, the ultimate aim of this language design is to allow clearer expression of real-world ideas, leading to better-performing and easier-to-maintain code. Even the "minor features" can significantly affect your programming style. How to Design Good Interfaces Monday, March 3 | 1:30 PM – 2:45 PM Bjarne Stroustrup So: We have classes, derived classes, virtual bases, templates, const, overloading, exceptions, and a host of other useful language features. How do we use them to produce well performing maintainable code? All too often we get seduced into using powerful language features to write clever (i.e., complicated) code rather than to simplify our interfaces and to make the organization of our code easier to understand. This presentation is a tour of the most useful C++ features from the point of view of how they can be used to express the structure of code and to define interfaces that serve basic needs such as flexibility, early error detection, acceptable compile time, performance, decent error reporting, and maintainability. How to Migrate C++ Code to the Manycore “Free Lunch” Monday, March 3 | 3:00 PM – 4:30 PM Herb Sutter For decades, we enjoyed the "free lunch" of seeing existing applications naturally run faster on new hardware with a faster single CPU core. Computation power is still growing, but in a fundamentally different direction -- more and more cores. We can regain the free lunch, but only by building applications in new ways that correctly apply concurrency and parallelism to express lots of latent concurrency that can scale well to a given number of cores but avoids penalizing the application when running on older hardware with one or few cores. This talk addresses the question of how to design new code, and how to migrate existing code, to be multicore/manycore enabled. We will cover best practices for finding and exploiting parallelism in algorithms and data structures, avoiding data structures that harm concurrency, using thread pools and background tasks effectively, and ways to cheat (if not entirely avoid) the spectre of Amdahl's Law. Most code examples will be illustrated using draft standard C++0x syntax, but can be directly translated to popular platforms and concurrency libraries, including Linux, Windows, .NET, and pthreads. What Not to Code: Avoiding Bad Design Choices and Worse Implementations Monday, March 3 | 10:15 AM – 11:45 AM Herb Sutter Our reality show premise is simple: Friends and coworkers nominate code that they consider poorly "fashioned" and ask the show to make over the victim. Our Code Police swoop in with a deal: We'll provide up to 15 minutes of public assistance in the form of amusing analyses and insightful improvements, discussing tradeoffs and alternatives that can make the code clearer, faster, simpler, and/or safer but only on the condition that they allow our instructor (that's Herb) to ruthlessly critique their existing code, and in some cases throw it out altogether, in front of a live studio audience (that's you). As members of that interactive audience, you will refresh your sense of elegance and beauty, not to mention old-fashioned performance and robustness and maintainability, so often lacking in the broken code littering today's bleak postmodern corporate landscape. Grill the Experts: Ask Us Anything! Monday, March 3 | 4:45 PM – 5:30 PM Bjarne Stroustrup and Herb Sutter This is your opportunity to get "thought leader" answers to your favorite C++ questions! We strongly encourage you to submit your questions in advance, preferably by email or in writing at the beginning of the seminar. Audience questions will also be taken from the floor. Both instructors will answer as many questions as time permits. REGISTER TODAY AT WWW.SDEXPO.COM! http://www.sdexpo.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Dr. Dobb's Journal - February 2008

Dr. Dobb's Journal - February 2008 Contents Hmmmm Alia Vox Developer Diaries Developer’s Notebook South American Software Development Conversations Inside Visual Studio 2008 BibPort: Creating Bibliographic References Continuous LINQ The ZK Framework Static Testing C++ Code The Agile Edge Effective Concurrency Swaine’s Flames

Dr. Dobb's Journal - February 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.