Herb Sutter: “Standardization Update: C++14 and the Seven Dwarfs”
Stephan T. Lavavej: “STL Features And Implementation Techniques”
Jared Hoberock: “Parallelizing the Standard Algorithms Library”
Howard Hinnant: “Types Don’t Know #”
Lisa Lippincott: “How to call C libraries from C++”

Herb Sutter: “Standardization Update: C++14 and the Seven Dwarfs“

Standardization has accelerated: By the time we meet at CppCon, C++14 might already be ratified. But that’s only one of eight (so far) work items now in flight. In this session, the chair of the ISO C++ committee will give a brief summary of the new features coming in C++14 itself, and then a tour of the seven (7) near-term separate Technical Specifications already underway — think of these as the “C++14 wave” of deliverables. The ISO C++ committee has transitioned to a “decoupled” model where updated versions of the standard are published more frequently, while at the same time major pieces of work can progress and be published independently from the Standard itself and delivered asynchronously in the form of Technical Specifications (TS’s) that are separate from the main Standard and can later be incorporated into the Standard. Come to this session to see how this is helping both the standard and C++ compiler implementations near you stay current with the latest in C++.

Speaker’s bio: Herb Sutter is the author of several best-selling books about C++, chair of the ISO C++ standards committee, and a software architect at Microsoft.

Stephan T. Lavavej: “STL Features And Implementation Techniques“

This session will cover selected STL features from C++11/14, both explaining how to use them and delving into implementation techniques that could be useful outside the STL. I will avoid covering popular features you’re already using (e.g. make_shared, make_unique) and obscure features of limited use (e.g. forward_list). The focus will be on useful but underappreciated features like dual-range algorithms, minimal allocators, and heterogeneous associative lookup.

Speaker’s bio: Stephan T. Lavavej is a Senior Developer at Microsoft. Since 2007, he’s worked with Dinkumware to maintain Visual C++’s implementation of the C++ Standard Library. He also designed a couple of C++14 features: make_unique and the transparent operator functors. He likes his initials (which people can actually spell) and cats (although he doesn’t own any).

Jared Hoberock: “Parallelizing the Standard Algorithms Library“

Until recently, C++ programmers building parallel programs found little support for parallelism in the standard toolbox. That’s changing with the technical specification on Extensions for Parallelism in C++. This talk will explore how programmers can build portable parallel programs from high-level parallel algorithms which can execute on CPU threads, vector units, and even GPUs.

Speaker’s bio: Jared Hoberock is a research scientist at NVIDIA where he develops the Thrust parallel algorithms library and edits the Technical Specification on Extensions for Parallelism for C++.

Howard Hinnant: “Types Don’t Know #“

This presentation will be based on the C++ standards committee proposal of a new hashing infrastructure that completely decouples hashing algorithms from individual types that need to be hashed. This decoupling divides the hashing computation among 3 different programmers who need not coordinate with each other:

1. Authors of hashable types (keys of type K) write their hashing support just once, using no specific hashing algorithm. This code resembles (and is approximately the same amount of work as) operator== and swap for a type.
2. Authors of hashing algorithms write a functor (e.g. H) that operates on a contiguous chunk of generic memory, represented by a void const* and a number of bytes. This code has no concept of a specific key type, only of bytes to be hashed.
3. Clients who want to hash keys of type K using hashing algorithm H will form a functor of type std::uhash<H> to give to an unordered container: unordered_set<K, uhash<H>>

Speaker’s bio: Howard Hinnant is a lead author of several C++11 features including: move semantics, unique_ptr, <mutex>, <condition_variable> and <chrono>. Coming in C++14: <shared_mutex>. Howard is also a lead author on two open source projects: a std::lib implementationand an Itanium ABI implementation

Lisa Lippincott: “How to call C libraries from C++“

Many libraries used by C++ programs present C-like interfaces that are compatible with C++, but are not directly compatible with good C++ style. Using these libraries directly is error-prone in many of the ways C++ is designed to avoid. It is better to pass through an interface layer that presents good C++ style on the C++ side. But writing such an interface layer is daunting. Completing it may be an enormous task, as are documenting it and maintaining it as the underlying library evolves. To address this problem, I will present a style of writing such interfaces that can be used incrementally as needed, and that reduces documentation cost. I will also present a small library that supports the writing of interface layers in this style.

Speaker’s bio: Lisa Lippincott is a Chief Software Architect at Tanium, a bay-area startup. Her claim to fame is writing one phrase appearing in the C++ standard. In her spare time, she studies mathematical logic with a category-theoretic approach.