C++ and Beyond

I’m very pleased to announce that C++ and Beyond 2012 will be held August 5-8 at the Grove Park Inn in Asheville, North Carolina.

Many thanks to Jamie for suggesting this venue in his comment on our request for possible locations.  We checked out everybody’s suggestions, but this one best matched our criteria for accessibility, availability, facilities, cost, and likely presence of fireflies.

In addition to Jamie’s comments about the GPI (Grove Park Inn), I can attest that the conference facilities should suit us very well.  The ballroom we’ll be using is both pleasant and functional, the AV support should be top-notch, free wireless is available throughout the complex, business services are present on-site, catering is experienced in dealing with groups with varying dietary constraints, and the people at the GPI seem genuinely eager to please. Those of you who attended C&B 2010 or C&B 2011 know that the Salish and the Banff Springs Hotel were great locations, but the GPI is actually better in some ways.  It’s closer to an airport, use of the athletic center is free for hotel guests, and complimentary on-site parking is available.

C&B 2012′s general format will be as it has been in the past: limited enrollment, an opening reception on Sunday evening, and three days of communal breakfasts, lunches, and intense technical sessions focusing on new, never-before-published-or-publicly-presented information.  A minor change to the format is to eliminate the unstructured evening sessions on Monday and Tuesday.  Making them part of the schedule actually imposed structure on them, which is contrary to what we intended. Those two evenings will now be free for truly informal hanging out, chatting, and what-have-you. This revision also permits us (me, Herb, and Andrei) to retreat to our rooms, when we need to, to research the tricky questions that C&B attendees are so adept at posing.

Registration fees will be unchanged, and the C&B rate for hotel rooms will be $189/night plus taxes.  We’ve done our best to negotiate hidden charges out of the contract, so you should really be able to stay at the GPI for $189/night plus taxes.  (I believe I’ve mentioned in the past the thrill of negotiating hotel contracts. It’s kind of like trying to chase down pointer errors, but without the sense of accomplishment when you’re done.)

In the coming weeks, we’ll post details about registering for C&B and about making reservations at the GPI, but for now, please reserve August 5-8 for the newest incarnation of C++ and Beyond.  We’re committed to making it the best C&B ever.  There’s a lot going on in the world of professional C++ software development, and Herb and Andrei are in the thick of so much of it, it’s an unrivaled time to have them share their wisdom.  As for me, I have a few things I’m working on that I think you’ll find both interesting and useful…

We all look forward to seeing you in Asheville in August.  If, in the meantime, you have any questions or comments about C&B 2012 that you’d prefer not to post as blog comments, feel free to email our friendly and helpful C&B Coordinator (otherwise known as Lisa Wells).

Scott

PS – I’m sorry that C&B 2012 will conflict with SIGGRAPH.   As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, trying to coordinate schedules among four busy parties (me, Herb, Andrei, and desirable event locations) is tricky, and other weeks simply didn’t work for all of us.  We tried. Honest.

Microsoft’s Channel  9 has just published the video of the final session from C&B 2011, our “Ask Us Anything!” panel.  As one might expect from a session with such an open-ended charter, the topics were all over the map.  Charles Torre at Channel 9 included the following table of contents in his post announcing the video:

[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?

Many thanks to Charles and Channel 9 for their hard work in making this and the other videos from C&B 2011 available.  A lot more goes into it than just setting up a camera and hitting “Record.”

This is the final video that will be posted from C&B 2011, but that means we can turn our attention to C&B 2012.  I’ll make a formal announcement about that later this week, but this much I can tell you now:  C&B 2012 will take place August 5-8, and it will be in the Eastern Time Zone of the USA.  Details are coming soon!

Scott

Microsoft’s Channel  9 has just published the panel that Herb, Andrei, and I held on concurrency and parallelism.  Enjoy!

Scott

There will be a C++ and Beyond in 2012!

It will probably be in early August, but keep reading.

To be honest, the fact that there will be an all-new C&B next year should be news of the “Well, duh” variety, because Herb and Andrei and I have all made clear that we’d like to do another one.  Because we’re in charge, you’d think that’d settle the matter.  Unfortunately, things aren’t so simple.  We each keep busy schedules with obligations booked months in advance, so trying to find dates when we’re all available was a challenge. Also, Andrei and Herb have day jobs at technology juggernauts, so they had to coordinate things with their corporate masters. And we have survey data from past C&B attendees regarding the best time of year to hold the event, so we wanted to do something consistent with that. Just last night, we agreed that a suitable time would be the first half of August, ideally either August 5-8 or 12-15, but, again, keep reading.

It’s nice that the three of us have found common scheduling ground, but it’s kind of important to make sure that the venue hosting the event has availability, too.  That means we need to know where we’ll be holding C&B 2012, and we don’t yet.  We have decided that we won’t hold it in either of our previous locations. We had a wonderful time at both of them, but the meeting space at The Salish (site of C&B 2010) isn’t large enough, and the Banff Springs Hotel (site of C&B 2011) isn’t inside the USA, which our survey data revealed to be an issue for some people.

You can help us figure out where to hold it. Our current thinking is to host C&B 2012 somewhere in the eastern part of the United States.  Practically speaking, we’re looking for a venue similar to The Salish and The BSH:  hotel with good meeting support, four-starish amenities, outdoorsey location with nearby hiking opportunities, not too far from a reasonable airport. Bonus points if there are likely to be fireflies present during the event, because (1) I like fireflies, (2) they don’t exist where I live (near Portland, Oregon, and my entomology friend tells me that we actually do have fireflies here, they simply don’t glow, but, please, like that counts…), and (3) it’s my turn to choose where to hold C&B.  (Herb chose in 2010, and Andrei chose last year.) If you have a hotel suggestion you think we should look into, let us know.  If you can do a cursory check to see if they have a room that can seat at least 300 people classroom-style, that would be helpful, because that’s the kind of room we need.  Not because we plan to host 300 people.  We don’t.  We need a room of that size because (1) we set up our seating at 2/3rds the listed capacity so that you won’t be elbow-to-elbow with your neighbors during the technical sessions and (2) we got spoiled by the rear-projection display system we used in Banff, and that means we’d like a bunch of empty space behind the screen to allow for rear-projection capability.  (For those of you who attended last year, the listed capacity for the room we were in is 300.)

Once we have a venue, we’ll post here with specific dates and details, but we’re not likely to have that information for a while.  It takes time to find candidate locations, investigate them, haggle over terms and conditions, and finally sign a contract.  In the meantime, please hold the first half of next August for C&B 2012, which we’re already plotting to make sure will be the best C&B ever.

Scott

The C&B 2011 panel discussion among me, Herb, and Andrei about C++11 is now live at Microsoft’s Channel 9, thanks to Charles Torre.  It’s actually been up for about two weeks already, but I was traveling and up to my eyeballs in other matters, hence the lateness of this post.  We hope you like the discussion.

There were two other panel discussions at C&B 2011 that Channel 9 recorded and will air.  The next one will probably go live in November, and the one after that in December. When they’re available, we’ll make postings here, ideally a lot sooner after they go live than two weeks after the fact….

Scott

What kind of person attends C++ and Beyond?  We wanted to know that before the event began, because we figured the more we knew about the attendees’ backgrounds, the better we could tailor our presentations to them.  Now that this year’s event is over, I thought you might be interested to see what we found out about the people who joined us in Banff.

Geographically, they came from nine countries. In no particular order, those countries were Taiwan, Germany, Canada, the United States, Brazil, Australia, England, Japan, and Sweden.  That means we drew people from five continents, which we were very excited about.  (Assuming we do another C&B, I’m going to press for free admission for the first resident from Antarctica to register.)

Our attendees’ years of experience with C++ vary, but the vast majority have between six and twenty years:

Their adoption of C++11 (nee C++0x) features in production code was surprisingly high, with over 20% permitted to use rvalue references, lambda expressions, auto variables, and regular expressions, and even more permitted to use unordered containers, std::function and std::bind, and std::shared_ptr and std::weak_ptr:

Because Herb was giving a talk on GPU programming and I was slated to explain the C++11 memory model, we asked a number of questions about people’s experience with concurrency and parallelism.  The first question asked for their years of experience with in-process concurrency (threads) other than GPU programming.  Over 60% had four or more years under their belts:

When it came to GPU programming, though, nearly 90% had no experience at all.  (This did not surprise us.)

The experience level picked up again when we asked about experience developing software using cross-process concurrency (separate processes) on a single machine, although nearly 20% had no experience with this kind of programming, a significantly higher value than for thread-based programming:

That number jumped to nearly 35% for cross-process concurrency (separate processes) on multiple machines (i.e., distributed computing), a sign that thread-based non-GPU concurrency is the most common form, at least among C&B attendees.

We were also curious about the size of the data sets C&B developers work with, so we asked.  The values were surprisingly distributed, with roughly 20% each typically working with tens, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, and hundreds of thousands of megabytes of data:

On the time front, over 70% of developers described their typical runtimes as being best measured in CPU-minutes, but there were a few whose runs corresponded to CPU-Months or CPU-Years.  (How’d you like to be the person responsible for a bug discovered near the end of a multiple CPU-year run?)

Finally, we asked about which of our books they’d read.  Contrary to what you might think, this had nothing to do with stroking our egos. Instead, we wanted to know what kind of information attendees were likely to have already absorbed.  Given a conference with the title “C++ and Beyond,” it’s not terribly surprising that Andrei’s book on D fared worse than the others. I was pleased to see that Effective C++, Third Edition got the highest ranking, because, you know, there’s something to be said for bragging rights over Herb and Andrei :-)

Microsoft’s Channel 9 just posted their first video from C++ and Beyond 2011. It’s a post-event interview that Charles Torre conducted with me, Herb, and Andrei, so even if you attended C&B in Banff, it’s something you have not seen. (Whether you want to see yet more of us is a different matter.) We hope you like it.

I mentioned in an earlier posting that we’d be posting photos from C&B in Banff, and those are now available at the C&B flickr site.  Some were taken at C&B itself, others are of the surrounding area.  If you have photos from C&B that you’d like to share, send them to us, and we’ll see that they get added to the collection.

Scott

Thanks to everybody for a very enjoyable and successful C++ and Beyond 2011 in Banff!   Andrei and Herb and I had a great time, and, judging by the evaluations, so did everyone who attended.

What’s next?, you may wonder.  Well:

• We’re in the process of preparing final PDF for all our talks, including slides we put together during C&B or pulled up on the fly.  You should also expect to see presentation materials with minor revisions, e.g., with bugs fixed that we found during the talks.  My revised double-checked locking code, for example, will now include, er, two checks and, um, a lock.  Ahem. We expect the final PDF to be available by the end of the week.  Look for email from Lisa telling you where to get it.
• Lisa’s email will also tell you about a post-event survey that will give you an opportunity to tell us what worked at C&B, what didn’t, and give us feedback on the relative importance of various aspects of the event.  We hope we made clear during C&B that we take your feedback seriously, and we act on it whenever we can, so please take the time to fill out the survey.  It’s short, I promise.
• Charles Torre from Microsoft’s Channel 9 as well as Ray Heath recorded the Q&A sessions at the end of each day, and Charles also recorded a post-event interview with Herb and Andrei and me, and our understanding is that Charles plans to take the raw videos and edit them into something suitable for human consumption, which he’ll then publish at Channel 9. When we get word that they are available, we’ll let you know, but note that Channel 9 also has its own RSS feed.
• 

  Andrei, Scott, and Herb at the end of C&B. Photo courtesy of Alan Gray.

  We’ve received photos taken by various people, and we plan to make at least some of those available.  If you took photos at C&B that you’d be willing to share, please send them to Lisa.  We’ll post about where to find the photos when we’ve got a place for them.

A number of people asked whether there will be another C&B next year, and Andrei, Herb, and I are already talking about the possibility.  We’re not making any promises, but you’ll notice that some of the questions on the post-event survey ask about when and where you’d like to see future events, so draw your own conclusions :-)

Scott