C++ and Beyond

We’ll be posting abstracts (summaries) of the C&B 2010 sessions over the coming days. Below is the first, for my talk on “Lambdas, Lambdas Everywhere.”

This is a brand new talk. I delivered a ‘sneak peek’ preview of a subset of this material in conjunction with the ISO C++ standards meeting in Switzerland two months ago, but the full talk will be given publicly for the first time at C++ and Beyond.

Historical trivia: This talk exists because Bjarne Stroustrup asked for it. Bjarne knew that I felt lambda functions were a game-changing feature that would have a pervasive impact on C++ coding style across many domains, and he asked me to write up the examples demonstrating why. This talk is the result.

Here’s the abstract:

Why care about C++0x lambda functions? Syntactically, they are nothing but sugar for function objects. However, they are an essential and enabling sugar that will change the way we will write C++ code more often than most people realize.

This talk will cover what lambda functions are and how to use them effectively, including how lambdas touch many wide-ranging kinds of code — from their convenience when writing concurrent and scalably parallel code, to how they stand to revolutionize STL usability and programming, to how they enable such small conveniences as local functions and local variable initialization.

Note that lambda functions, although futuristic, are not a far-future feature. They are available today in several shipping C++ compilers, including Intel C++ 11, Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, and gcc 4.5. The future is now. Come find out how this powerful feature affects you and your code.

About the speaker: Herb Sutter is an architect on the Windows C++ team at Microsoft and the chair of the ISO C++ standards committee. He is the main designer of lambda functions in Visual C++ 2010 and their integration with the VC++ Parallel Patterns Library, and is partly responsible for the design of lambda functions in the C++0x standard, notably their final syntax.