Month: June 2017

The rise of the new language MC++

During the last few years we talk about the “C++ Renaissance”. We have to admit that Microsoft was a major part of this movement, I remember this video where Craig Symonds and Mohsen Agsen talked about it.

In 2011 Microsoft announced in many articles the comeback of C++, and Microsoft C++ experts like Herb Sutter did many conferences to explain why C++ was back and mostly recommended the use of Modern C++. At the same time the standard C++11 was approved and we began to talk about C++ as a new language. Continue reading “The rise of the new language MC++”

What Clang can tell you about your Visual C++ projects?

Each compiler could report after the build many warnings. These warnings won’t keep your code from compiling except if you decide to treat them as errors. Don’t hesitate to take a look as these warnings instead of ignoring them. Indeed compiler warnings are often indicators of future bugs that you would see only at runtime.

Clang is a C/C++/Objective C compiler with many interesting features, here are some major end user features:

  • Fast compiles and low memory usage.
  • Expressive diagnostics.
  • GCC compatibility.

Continue reading “What Clang can tell you about your Visual C++ projects?”

Doom3 is the proof that “keep it simple” works.

If you search on the web for the best C++ source code. The Doom3 source code is mentioned many times, with testimonials  like this one.

I spent a bit of time going through the Doom3 source code. It’s probably the cleanest and nicest looking code I’ve ever seen.

Doom 3 is a video game developed by id Software and published by Activision.The game was a  commercial success for id Software; with more than 3.5 million copies of the game were sold. Continue reading “Doom3 is the proof that “keep it simple” works.”

How it was the C source code 25 years ago?

C is one of the most popular language around all the world, it was initially developed by Dennis Ritchie between 1969 and 1973 at AT&T Bell Labs. Many thousands of projects was developed using C since then. It’s used for all kinds of needs, we can enumerate OS, embedded applications, gaming development, image processing, word processing and database engines.

It’s interesting to discover the evolution of a language, and how it evolved over years of feedbacks from developers and end users. We will go back 25 years ago to discover how some C projects were implemented. Continue reading “How it was the C source code 25 years ago?”

20 Years of Boost C++: Original Vision Review

In 1998 a proposal for  a C++ Library Repository Web Site was posted by Beman G. Dawes. The original vision aims to satisfy two major goals:

  • A world-wide website containing a repository of free C++ class libraries would be of great benefit to the C++ community. Although other sites supply specific libraries or provide links to libraries, there is currently no well-known website that acts as a general repository for C++ libraries. The vision is this: a site where programmers can find the libraries they need, post libraries they would like to share, and which can act as a focal point to encourage innovative C++ library development. An online peer review process is envisioned to ensure library quality with a minimum of bureaucracy.
  • Secondary goals include encouraging effective programming techniques and providing a focal point for C++ programmers to participate in a wider community. Additionally, such a site might foster C++ standards activity by helping to establish existing practice.

Continue reading “20 Years of Boost C++: Original Vision Review”

Spotting C++11/C++14/C++17 Features in WinObjC: A Study

In a previous post we talked about the clang-modernize tool to detect where you can use some new C++11 features to modernize your C++ source code. But how can we easily detect where the new C++ features are used in a project?

Facebook and Google use C++11 extensively in their source code. Folly from Facebook as we discovered in a previous post use almost all of the C++11 features and I was curious to know if Microsoft also use the new  C++11 standards in their open sourced code. Continue reading “Spotting C++11/C++14/C++17 Features in WinObjC: A Study”

Lessons to learn from the CLang/LLVM codebase

It’s proven that Clang is a mature compiler For C and C++ as GCC and Microsoft compilers, but what makes it special is the fact that it’s not just a compiler. It’s also an infrastructure to build tools. Thanks to its library based architecture which makes the reuse and integration of functionality provided more flexible and easier to integrate into other projects. Continue reading “Lessons to learn from the CLang/LLVM codebase”

Optimize Memory in C++: Doxygen Case Study

When the processes running on your machine attempt to allocate more memory than your system has available, the kernel begins to swap memory pages to and from the disk. This is done in order to free up sufficient physical memory to meet the RAM allocation requirements of the requestor.

Excessive use of swapping is called thrashing and is undesirable because it lowers overall system performance, mainly because hard drives are far slower than RAM. Continue reading “Optimize Memory in C++: Doxygen Case Study”

Discover your C++ project internals: POCO case study

The POCO C++ Libraries are a collection of open source class libraries for developing network-centric, portable applications in C++.

POCO stands for POrtable COmponents. The libraries cover functionality such as threads, thread synchronization, file system access, streams, shared libraries and class loading, sockets and network protocols (HTTP, FTP, SMTP, etc.), and include an HTTP server, as well as an XML parser with SAX2 and DOM interfaces and SQL database access.

The modular and efficient design and implementation makes the POCO C++ Libraries well suited for embedded development. Continue reading “Discover your C++ project internals: POCO case study”

5 Common reasons of using namespaces in C++ projects

Namespaces were introduced to the C++ Standard in 1995 and usually they are defined like this:

A namespace defines a new scope. They provide a way to avoid name collisions.

Namespaces in C++ are most often used to avoid naming collisions. Although namespaces are used extensively in recent C++ code, most older code does not use this facility. 

After exploring the source code of many C++ projects, here are some common reasons of using the namespaces in these projects. Continue reading “5 Common reasons of using namespaces in C++ projects”