Tag: cpp

We really need some safeguards against the richness of C++.

The AtomicObject team described well on their website the danger of the richness of C++:

C++ is an immensely rich language. This richness is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing, because of the expressive power and support for several programming paradigms; a curse because this richness means complexity, and there is much to master. C++ is a language to grow with, one for which each experience can teach new features, or better understanding.

Since each of C++’s features may interact with the others, learning C++ feels like gradually filling in a not-so-sparse matrix of knowledge formed by the cross product of the C++ feature vector with itself. No serious use of the language should be undertaken without good references at hand.

Continue reading “We really need some safeguards against the richness of C++.”

The first enemy of C++ is its past.

Before the initial standardization in 1998, C++ was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup at Bell Labs since 1979, as an extension of the C language as he wanted an efficient and flexible language similar to C

In 1983, “C with Classes” was renamed to “C++”, adding new features that included virtual functions, function name and operator overloading, references, constants, type-safe free-store memory allocation (new/delete), improved type checking. Continue reading “The first enemy of C++ is its past.”

The Importance of C++ Distributed Build Systems

As C++ developer if you have already build a C# or a java project you could be surprised by the speed of the build compared to C++. For some C++ projects it could take few minutes and for others, it could take many hours. It depends on the project size.
And even if the compilation phase is parallelized by using the cores available, the build still take too long compared to the other languages. Here are some reasons from this good stack overflow answer: Continue reading “The Importance of C++ Distributed Build Systems”

Is the Free Lunch Over? Revisiting Herb Sutter Prediction

Back in March 2005 when herb Sutter published its famous article “The free lunch is over”  and predicted a Concurrent Programming Revolution as big as Object-Oriented Revolution. And here’s a short explanation from the article about the prediction motivation  : Continue reading “Is the Free Lunch Over? Revisiting Herb Sutter Prediction”

John Carmack: A C++ Programming Legend

Have you already seen a basketball or a soccer player plays a simple yet effective game to such a point that you say: Why couldn’t everybody play like him, he uses only easy techniques?

And as C++ programmer I had the same remark when exploring the John Carmack source code. It’s so simple, we wonder why we can ‘t develop like him.

Let’s explore some Doom3 source code choices and try to understand why the code even if it’s simple, it’s very efficient.

On November 23, 2011 id Software maintained the tradition and it released the source code of their previous engine. This source code was reviewed by many developers, here’s as an example of Doom3 feedback from fabien (orginal source): Continue reading “John Carmack: A C++ Programming Legend”

Thrashing Impact on C++ Performance: Doxygen Analysis

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 “Thrashing Impact on C++ Performance: Doxygen Analysis”

Boost Performance with V8 Engine: A Design Choices Study

The V8 engine is Google’s open source, high-performance JavaScript engine written in C++. Alongside Google Chrome, it can also be found in MongoDb , Node.js, and many other popular applications.

It’s very interesting to discover what makes V8 so fast and which solutions were used to achieve this goal. Continue reading “Boost Performance with V8 Engine: A Design Choices Study”

Exploring Modern C++ Design: MemCache++ Case Study

MemCache++ is a light-weight, type-safe, simple to use and full-featured Memcache client. It was developed by Dean Michael Berris who is a C++ fanatic and currently works at Google Australia. He also is part of the Google delegation to the ISO C++ Committee.

Studying the well-designed libraries is recommended to elevate your  C++ design and implementation skills, and the goal of this article is to discover some memcache++ design choices that make it easy to understand and use. Continue reading “Exploring Modern C++ Design: MemCache++ Case Study”

Don’t touch to my C++ code.

Back to 2005  when I  worked in a company where most of the code was developed in C++, in 2006 the managers decide to develop the new projects with C# and also migrate some C++ projects to C#, here were  their arguments against C++:

  • C++ is too complex.
  • The C++ build system is too difficult to manage and maintain.
  • C++ is stagnated for many years and it’s on its way to dying.
  • It becomes very difficult to recruit a C++ developer.

Continue reading “Don’t touch to my C++ code.”