Jeff Garland: “Rebuilding Boost Date-Time for C++11”

Kate Gregory and James McNellis: “Making C++ Code Beautiful”

Joel Falcou: “Costless Software Abstractions for Parallel Architectures”

Walter E. Brown: “Your Help Wanted: Language Proposals in Flight”

Jens Weller and Jon Kalb: “Founding C++ User Groups”

Jeff Garland: “Rebuilding Boost Date-Time for C++11“

Boost date_time is a widely used C++ library originally released in 2001 — including being the basis for elements of the chrono library in C++11. While the library interface has stayed stable for more than a decade, the world around it has changed with the standard library and language changing. It is time for the library to be rewritten to account for C++11. This lecture describes in detail the design decisions and changes to the library for C++11. More generally it describes elements of design for a small valuetype library. Many of these considerations involve new features of C++11 and how they should be used. This includes noexcept, move construction/assignment (R-values), constexpr, enum classes, and user defined literals. Attendees will learn about the design considerations and tradeoffs of using the new language features in their own work while getting a glimpse of boost date_time version 2.

Speaker’s bio: Jeff Garland has worked on many large-scale, distributed software projects over the past 25+ years. He’s a long time participant in the Boost and C++ community including developing Boost date_time, serving as a moderator and Boost steering committee member, co-authoring papers for the C++11 chrono library, and running the annual Library in a Week workshop at C++Now. Mr. Garland holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science from Arizona State University and a Bachelor of Science in Systems Engineering from the University of Arizona. He is a co-author of “Large Scale Software Architecture: A Practical Guide Using UML.”

Kate Gregory and James McNellis: “Making C++ Code Beautiful“

Ask a non-C++ developer what they think of C++ and they’ll give the language plenty of compliments: powerful, fast, flexible, and “the language for smart people”. But along with that you are likely to hear ugly, complicated, hard to read, and “the language for smart people”. Is it possible to write beautiful C++? Not arcanely elegant or wickedly compact, but readable, clear, expressive – beautiful! We say it is, and we want to show you how. In this session, you’ll see how to turn pages of “comic book characters swearing” into code you’ll be proud to call your own. By making your code express your intent, using the power of new language and library functionality, and leaving hard-to-read constructs out of your vocabulary, you can give your code a makeover that will stand the test of time.

Speakers’ bio: Kate Gregory has been using C++ since before Microsoft had a C++ compiler. She writes, mentors, codes, and leads projects, in both C++ and .NET, especially for Windows 7 and 8. Kate is a Microsoft Regional Director, a Visual C++ MVP, and has written over a dozen books (the most recent on C++ AMP for Microsoft Press) and speaks at conferences and user groups around the world. Kate develops courses on C++, Visual Studio, and Windows programming for Pluralsight, founded the East of Toronto .NET Users group, and is a member of adjunct faculty at Trent University in Peterborough.

James McNellis is a senior engineer on the Microsoft Visual C++ team, where he is responsible for the Visual C++ C Runtime (CRT) and C Standard Library implementation. He was previously a member of the Microsoft Expression Blend team, developing the XAML designer tools for Windows 8 apps. Prior to joining Microsoft in 2010, he spent several years working on real-time 3-D simulation and robotics projects in the defense industry. James is a prolific contributor on the Stack Overflow programming Q&A website and occasionally writes for the Visual C++ Team Blog.

Joel Falcou: “Costless Software Abstractions for Parallel Architectures“

Performing large, intensive or non-trivial computing on array-like data structures is one of the most common task in scientific computing, video game development and other fields. This matter of fact is backed up by the large number of tools, languages and libraries to perform such tasks. If we restrict ourselves to C++-based solutions, more than a dozen such libraries exists from BLAS/LAPACK C++ binding to template meta-programming-based Blitz++ or Eigen. Even if all of these libraries provide good performance or good abstraction, none of them seems to fit the need of so many different user types. Moreover, as parallel system complexity grows, the need to maintain all those components quickly becomes unwieldy. This talk explores various software design techniques, like Generative Programming, Meta Programming and Generic Programming, and their application to the implementation of a parallel computing librariy in such a way that abstraction and expressiveness are maximized while cost over efficiency is minimized. We’ll skim over various applications and see how they can benefit from such tools. We will conclude by discussing what lessons were learnt from this kind of implementation and how those lessons can translate into new directions for the language itself.

Speaker’s bio: Joel Falcou is an assistant professor at the University Paris-Sud and researcher at the Laboratoire de Recherche d’Informatique in Orsay, France. His research focuses on studying generative programming idioms and techniques to design tools for parallel software development. The two main parts of those works are: exploration of Embedded Domain Specific Language design for parallel computing on various architectures and the definition of a formal framework for reasoning about meta-programs and prove their compile-time correctness. Applications range from real-time image processing on embedded architectures to High Performance Computing on multi-core clusters. He is a NumScale SAS scientific advisor. NumScale mission is to assist businesses in the exploration and subsequently the mastery of high-performance computing systems.

Walter E. Brown: “Your Help Wanted: Language Proposals in Flight“

Want to collaborate in designing and implementing a new feature for C++17? Then this session is for you! After reviewing the process by which a new C++ feature enters the language, we will look at one or two of the speaker’s proposals that have received early favorable review from the standards committee, and that are awaiting sample implementation and/or formal wording. Attendee feedback will be solicited, and collaborators will be sought to help bring the proposal(s) to fruition.

Speaker’s bio: With broad experience in industry, academia, consulting, and research, Dr. Walter E. Brown has been a C++ programmer for over thirty years, joining the C++ standards effort in 2000. Among numerous other contributions, he is responsible for introducing such now-standard C++ library features as cbegin/cend and common_type as well as headers <random> and <ratio>, and has significantly impacted such core language features as alias templates, contextual conversions, and variable templates. He conceived and served as project editor for the International Standard on Special Mathematical Functions in C++. When not playing with his grandchildren, Dr. Brown is an Emeritus participant in the C++ standards process, with several more core and library proposals under consideration. He was recently appointed an associate project editor for the C++ standard itself.

Jens Weller and Jon Kalb: “Founding C++ User Groups“

In September “Meeting C++” will have existed for a little more than 2 years. Within those 2 years we went from a few C++ User Groups in Europe to many. We would like to talk about how to continue with founding even more C++ User Groups, but also sharing an overview of the already active User Groups in Europe and the US.

Speakers’ bio: Jens Weller has worked, since 2007, as a freelancer in C++, specialising in consulting, training and programming C++. He started with programming C++ back in 1998. He is an active member of the European C++ community and the founder of the Meeting C++ platform and conference. Jens is an active supporter of C++ user groups and blogs often about C++.

Jon has been programming in C++ for twenty years. He is currently doing this for Amazon’s A9.com. During the last two decades he has written C++ for Amazon, Apple, Dow Chemical, Intuit, Lotus, Microsoft, Netscape, Sun, Yahoo! and a number of companies that you’ve never heard of. He taught C++ at the graduate school at Golden Gate University for a couple of years and is currently chair of C++ Now (aka BoostCon) and of the Boost Steering Committee. Jon’s current interest is coming up to speed with C++11/14.