poster (small)For those of you who are attending C&B next week, Scott already recommended some background reading for your pre-seminar enjoyment.

I also have one piece of background reading I’d like to recommend all attendees reread before my Wednesday morning talk on “C++14 Style”:

Guru of the Week #91: Smart Pointer Parameters

It’s not long, but it’s important. Please take time to review it on your way to sunny (maybe) Snoqualmie, WA, USA.

I look forward to seeing many of you next week! Be sure to attend the Monday night reception if at all possible. It’ll be a relaxed informal (and likely still informative) gathering that will set a nice tone for the event. See you there.

 

This session will cover modern and current C++ style, focusing on C++14. I’ll demonstrate how major features and idioms from C++98 are now entirely replaced or subsumed and should be used no more; how other major features and idioms have been dramatically improved to the point where you code is cleaner and safer and you’ll even think in a different style; and how pervasive styles as common as variable declarations are changed forever, and not just for style but for serious technical safety and efficiency benefits. For one thing, you’ll never look at ‘auto’ the same way again (there, I said it; bring out the lederhosen and pitchforks! or attend the session and challenge in person to dig deep into the good reasons for the new reality).

Why C++14? Two reasons: First, it really does “complete C++11″ with small but important consistency features like generic lambdas and make_unique that let us teach modern C++ style with fewer “except for” footnotes. Second, C++14 “is” C++ for the next several years and it’s real; as of last month it’s feature-complete, and I expect we will have at least two complete major commercial implementations available next year around the same time C++14 is formally published.

C++14 is a small but important improvement on C++11 that really does complete the language. What this means is that we’re going to have a complete and simpler set of idioms and styles to learn and use.

I’m planning to spend at least two hours in these highly interactive sessions. Be prepared to interact, challenge, and otherwise participate, and to discover new and useful information even if you’ve already been heavily using C++11.

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At the end of the Monday afternoon session, I will be making a special announcement related to Standard C++ on all platforms. Be there to hear the details, and to receive an extra perk that’s being reserved for C&B 2012 attendees only.

  • Note: We sometimes record sessions and make them freely available online via Channel 9, and we intend to do that again this year for some selected sessions. However, this session is for C&B attendees only and will not be recorded.

Registration is open until Wednesday and the event is pretty full but a few spaces are still available. I’m looking forward to seeing many of you there for a top-notch C++ conference full of fresh new current material – I’ve seen Andrei’s and Scott’s talk slides too, and I think this C&B is going to be the best one yet.

You’ll leave exhausted, but with a full brain and quite likely a big silly grin as you think about all the ways to use the material right away on your current project back home.

imageHere’s another deep session for C&B 2012 on August 5-8 – if you haven’t registered yet, register soon. We got a bigger venue this time, but as I write this the event is currently almost 75% full with five weeks to go.

I know, I’ve already posted three sessions and a panel. But there’s just so much about C++11 to cover, so here’s a fourth brand-new session I’ll do at C&B 2012 that goes deeper on its topic than I’ve ever been willing to go before.

atomic<> Weapons: The C++11 Memory Model and Modern Hardware

This session in one word: Deep.

It’s a session that includes topics I’ve publicly said for years is Stuff You Shouldn’t Need To Know and I Just Won’t Teach, but it’s becoming achingly clear that people do need to know about it. Achingly, heartbreakingly clear, because some hardware incents you to pull out the big guns to achieve top performance, and C++ programmers just are so addicted to full performance that they’ll reach for the big red levers with the flashing warning lights. Since we can’t keep people from pulling the big red levers, we’d better document the A to Z of what the levers actually do, so that people don’t SCRAM unless they really, really, really meant to.

This session covers:

  • The facts: The C++11 memory model and what it requires you to do to make sure your code is correct and stays correct. We’ll include clear answers to several FAQs: “how do the compiler and hardware cooperate to remember how to respect these rules?”, “what is a race condition?”, and the ageless one-hand-clapping question “how is a race condition like a debugger?”
  • The tools: The deep interrelationships and fundamental tradeoffs among mutexes, atomics, and fences/barriers. I’ll try to convince you why standalone memory barriers are bad, and why barriers should always be associated with a specific load or store.
  • The unspeakables: I’ll grudgingly and reluctantly talk about the Thing I Said I’d Never Teach That Programmers Should Never Need To Now: relaxed atomics. Don’t use them! If you can avoid it. But here’s what you need to know, even though it would be nice if you didn’t need to know it.
  • The rapidly-changing hardware reality: How locks and atomics map to hardware instructions on ARM and x86/x64, and throw in POWER and Itanium for good measure – and I’ll cover how and why the answers are actually different last year and this year, and how they will likely be different again a few years from now. We’ll cover how the latest CPU and GPU hardware memory models are rapidly evolving, and how this directly affects C++ programmers.
  • Coda: Volatile and “compiler-only” memory barriers. It’s important to understand exactly what atomic and volatile are and aren’t for. I’ll show both why they’re both utterly unrelated (they have exactly zero overlapping uses, really) and yet are fundamentally related when viewed from the perspective of talking about the memory model. Also, people keep seeing and asking about “compiler-only” memory barriers and when to use them – they do have a valid-though-rare use, but it’s not the use that most people are trying to use them for, so beware!

For me, this is going to be the deepest and most fun C&B yet. At previous C&Bs I’ve spoken about not only code, but also meta topics like design and C++’s role in the marketplace. This time it looks like all my talks will be back to Just Code. Fun times!

Here a snapshot of the list of C&B 2012 sessions so far:

Universal References in C++11 (Scott)
You Don’t Know [keyword] and [keyword] (Herb)
Convincing Your Colleagues (Panel)
Initial Thoughts on Effective C++11 (Scott)
Modern C++ = Clean, Safe, and Faster Than Ever (Panel)
Error Resilience in C++11 (Andrei)
C++ Concurrency – 2012 State of the Art (and Standard) (Herb)
C++ Parallelism – 2012 State of the Art (and Standard) (Herb)
Secrets of the C++11 Threading API (Scott)
atomic<> Weapons: The C++11 Memory Model and Modern Hardware (Herb)

It’ll be a blast. I hope to see many of you there. Register soon.

It’s time for, not one, but two brand-new, up-to-date talks on the state of the art of concurrency and parallelism in C++. I’m going to put them together especially and only for C++ and Beyond 2012, and I’ll be giving them nowhere else this year:

  • C++ Concurrency – 2012 State of the Art (and Standard)
  • C++ Parallelism – 2012 State of the Art (and Standard)

And there’s a lot to tell. 2012 has already been a busy year for the pushing the boundaries of both “shipping-and-practical” and “proto-standard” concurrency and parallelism in C++:

  • In February, the spring ISO C++ standards meeting saw record attendance at 73 experts (normal is 50-55), and spent the full week primarily on new language and library proposals, with notable emphasis on the area of concurrency and parallelism. There was so much interest that I formed four Study Groups and appointed chairs: the largest on concurrency and parallelism (SG1, Hans Boehm), and three others on modules (SG2, Doug Gregor), filesystem (SG3, Beman Dawes), and networking (SG4, Kyle Kloepper).
  • Three weeks ago, we hosted another three-day face-to-face meeting for SG1 and SG4 – and at nearly 40 people the SG1 attendance rivaled that of a normal full ISO C++ meeting, with a who’s-who of the world’s concurrency and parallelism experts in attendance and further proposal presentations from companies like IBM, Intel, and Microsoft. There was so much interest that I had to form a new Study Group 5 for Transactional Memory (SG5), and appointed Michael Wong of IBM as chair.
  • Over the summer, we’ll all be working on updated proposals for the October ISO C++ meeting in Portland.

Things are heating up, and we’re narrowing down which areas to focus on.

I’ve spoken and written on these topics before. Here’s what’s different about these talks:

  • Brand new: This material goes beyond what I’ve written and taught about before in my Effective Concurrency articles and courses.
  • Cutting-edge current: It covers the best-practices state of the art techniques and shipping tools, and what parts of that are standardized in C++11 already (the answer to that one may surprise you!) and what’s en route to near-term standardization and why, with coverage of the latest discussions.
  • Mainstream hardware – many kinds of parallelism: What’s the relationship among multi-core CPUs, hardware threads, SIMD vector units (Intel SSE and AVX, ARM Neon), and GPGPU (general-purpose computation on GPUs, which I covered at C++ and Beyond 2011)? Which are most interesting, what technologies are available now, and what’s being considered for near-term standardization?
  • Blocking vs. non-blocking: What’s the difference between blocking and non-blocking styles, why on earth would you care, which kinds does C++11 support, and how are we looking at rounding it out in C++1y?
  • Task and data parallelism: What’s the difference between task parallelism and data parallelism, which kind of of hardware does each allow you to exploit, and why?
  • Work stealing: What’s the difference between thread pools and work stealing, what are the major flavors of work stealing, which of these (if any) does C++11 already support and is already shipping on some advanced commercial C++ compilers today (this answer will likely surprise you), and what needs to be done in the next round for a complete state-of-the-art parallelism story in C++1y?

The answers all matter to you – even the ones not yet in the C++ standard – because they are real, available in shipping products, and affect how you design your software today.

This will be a broad and deep dive. At C++ and Beyond 2011, the attendees (audience!) included some of the world’s leading experts on parallelism and compilers. At these sessions of C&B 2012, I expect anyone who wasn’t personally at the SG1 meeting this month, even world-class experts, will learn something new in these talks. I certainly did, and that’s why I’m motivated to turn the information into talks and share. This isn’t just cool stuff – it’s important and useful in production code today.

I hope to see many of you at C&B 2012. I’m excited about these topics, and about Scott’s and Andrei’s new material – you just can’t get this stuff anywhere else.

Asheville is going to be blast. I can’t wait.

Herb


P.S.: I haven’t seen this much attention and investment in C++ since last century – C++ conferences at record numbers, C++ compiler investments by the biggest companies in the industry (e.g., Clang), and much more that we’ve seen already…

… and a little bird tells me there’s a lot more major C++ news coming this year. Stay tuned, and fasten your seat belts. 2012 ain’t done yet, not by a long shot, and I’ll be able to say more about C++ as a whole (besides the specific topics mentioned above) for the first time at C&B in August. I hope to see you there.

FYI, C&B is already over 60% full, and early bird registration ends this Friday, June 1 – so register today.

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C++11 is kind of like “C++ Dreamliner.” It’s built with world-class modern materials. It took a couple more years to finish than originally expected. But now it’s starting to roll out worldwide and flying more safely and efficiently than ever. (European readers may equally consider it “C++ 380.”)

I write and teach, speaking about C++11 in particular:

“Modern C++ is clean, safe, and fast – modern C++ code is as readable and as type- and memory-safe as code written in any other modern language [*], and it has always been the king of ‘fast’ and is now faster than ever with new features like move semantics.” – Herb Sutter

Bjarne Stroustrup made me add, at the end of the “clean and safe” part:

“[*] When used in a modern style.” – Bjarne Stroustrup

Bjarne and I claim this to be true. Others have disputed various parts of this statement – whether C++11 really has a usable safe subset, whether C++ is really necessarily faster than code in other languages, and other questions. What’s the truth?

These answers matter. Type safety and memory safety are important not only for writing reliable code that will fail or be abused less often, but also for improving developer productivity so that developers can spend less time on overhead “taxes” like checking for unsafe casts or buffer overruns. And the claim that C++ really is the king of “fast” has been consistently challenged for most of its history.

In this panel, Scott, Andrei, and I will weigh in with discussion – and data – on these important and current questions.

I plan to give a brand-new talk for the first time at C&B, but I’m conflicted regarding what to say about it here because it’s recently been a bit of a startling realization to me about C++11, and I think it may be a bit startling for others too. I don’t want to be a tease, but I also want to save it as a surprise for C&B itself.

In the meantime, here’s a teaser…

In addition to the many new C++11 features that everyone’s listing, it has dawned on me over the winter that there’s actually another major change that isn’t being talked about anywhere, or even being listed as a change in C++11 at all as far as I know, because I and other key experts and committee members I’ve asked didn’t fully realize that we altered the basic meaning of not one but two fundamental keywords in C++. It’s a change that has profound consequences, that rewrites and/or invalidates several pieces of pre-C++11 design guidance, and that’s directly related to writing solid code in a concurrent and parallel world. This isn’t just an academic change, either — everyone is going to have to learn and apply the new C++11 guidance that we’ll cover in this session.

I plan to talk about it first at C&B, in a session tentatively titled as above — I’ll fill in the keywords later. You may already guess a few keyword candidates based on the description above, and here’s a final hint: You’ll hardly find two C++ keywords that are older, or whose meanings are more changed from C++98 to C++11. (No, they aren’t auto and register.)

Herb