Alisdair Meredith: “What’s New In The C++14 Library”
Hartmut Kaiser: “Asynchronous Computation in C++”
Eric Niebler: “Range-ifying the STL”
Michael Wong: “What did C++ do for Transactional Memory?”
John Lakos: “Defensive Programming Done Right”

Alisdair Meredith: “What’s New In The C++14 Library“

After the grand expansion of the C++11 library, the extensions in C++14 are more modest, often tweaking and cleaning up existing components. Alisdair Meredith, the Library Working Group chair, walks through all these changes and additions, and a little insight into features that did not make the cut, and are expected to arrive in other Technical Specification before the next standard ships.

Speaker’s bio: Alisdair Meredith is a software developer at BloombergLP in New York, and the C++ Standard Committee Library Working Group chair. He has been an active member of the C++ committee for just over a decade, and by a lucky co-incidence his first meeting was the kick-off meeting for the project that would become C++11, and also fixed the contents of the original library TR. He is currently working on the BDE project, BloombergLP’s open source libraries that offer a foundation for C++ development, including a standard library implementation supporting the polymorphic allocator model proposed for standardization.

Hartmut Kaiser: “Asynchronous Computation in C++“

With the adoption of the new C++11 Standard the community sees a revival of interest in the language. This interest is also driven by the demands that new computer architectures and technologies are exerting on application developers and domain scientists. Especially the need for highly runtime adaptive algorithms and applications puts a great strain on our ability to efficiently write code which performs well and which scales satisfactory, as multi-core and multi-threading is the new modality of computation. We argue that new programming models have to be developed if we are to gain continued scalability of computations as we increase the size of our systems. These are programming models which work equally well for inter-node as well for intra-node use. With the degree of complexity and size increasing in new hardware architectures, applications are more and more hindered by the main bottlenecks in computation, namely starvation, latency, overheads, and waiting for contention resolution. We present HPX, which is a general purpose parallel C++ runtime system implementing a new model of computation – ParalleX, that attempts to address those challenges. We show results from using HPX for leveraging and managing asynchrony, overlapping different phases of computation and communication, suggesting ways to seamlessly expose it to programmers in an easy to use way.

Speaker’s bio: Hartmut is a member of the faculty at the CS department at Louisiana State University (LSU) and a senior research scientist at LSU’s Center for Computation and Technology (CCT). He received his doctorate from the Technical University of Chemnitz (Germany) in 1988. He is probably best known through his involvement in open source software projects, mainly as the author of several C++ libraries he has contributed to Boost, which are in use by thousands of developers worldwide. His current research is focused on leading the STE||AR group at CCT working on the practical design and implementation of future execution models and programming methods. His research interests are focused on the complex interaction of compiler technologies, runtime systems, active libraries, and modern system’s architectures. His goal is to enable the creation of a new generation of scientific applications in powerful, though complex environments, such as high performance computing, distributed and grid computing, spatial information systems, and compiler technologies.

Eric Niebler: “Range-ifying the STL“

Range-based interfaces have many advantages over iterator-based ones. That explains why there are several range libraries to choose from. The standardization committee has been hard at work exploring the range library design space, and with luck we’ll have a best-of-breed solution ready for C++17. In this talk, I will present the work of several committee members, myself included, to put together a range library suitable for standardization. The work condenses the ideas from several popular range libraries, some new ideas, and much guidance from SG9, the Ranges Study Group. Come find out how we’re planning to make the STL easier to use, more powerful, and even more efficient than it already is, while keeping everything you already love.

Speaker’s bio: Eric Niebler is a true believer in the power of low-overhead abstraction and a shameless bit-twiddler, which explains his deep and abiding love of C++. Before setting out on his own as a freelancer, Eric worked as a consultant for BoostPro, a library developer for Visual C++, and a systems developer in Microsoft Research. He has authored 4 official Boost libraries, is on the Boost Steering Committee, and is a member of the C++ Standardization Committee. Eric lived for over 2 years years with no fixed address, slinging code from the coffee shops of the world. Buy him a beer and ask him about his life as a tech-nomad.

Michael Wong: “What did C++ do for Transactional Memory?“

SG5 is a Study Group within WG21 developing a promising new way to deal with mutable shared memory, that is expected to be more usable and scalable than current techniques based on atomics and mutexes. It promises to be as easy to use as coarse-grained locks, as scalable as fine-grained locks and yet remain composable. Find out where on the Gartner hype cycle lives Transactional Memory. Is it at the Peak of Inflated Expectations, Trough of Disillusionment, Slope of Enlightenment, or Plateau of Productivity? For that matter, just how soon will I be able to use it with the new Intel Haswell, and IBM Power Hardware, or is it one of those mirages where the closer you get to your hardware, the further it moves away. And is it true that one of the lead author of this TM proposal also wrote “Is it just a Research Toy?” This 60-90 minute advanced talk will cover the history of Transactional Memory, various lock elision and optimistic speculation techniques, the technical engine behind Transactional Memory, the recent research in its use cases, usability and performance data that supports its entry into the C++ Standard, and of course the latest details of the SG5 Technical Specification, including our effort at transactionalizing the C++ Standard Library.

Speaker’s bio: Michael Wong is the CEO of the OpenMP Corporation, a consortium of 26 member companies that hold the de-facto standard for parallel programming specification for C/C++ and FORTRAN. He is the IBM and Canadian Head of delegation to the C++ Standard, and Chair of the WG21 Transactional Memory group. He is the co-author of a number of C++/OpenMP/TM features and patents. He is the past C++ team lead to IBM´s XL C++ compiler, C compiler and has been designing C++ compilers for twenty years. Currently, he is leading the C++11 deployment as a senior technical lead for IBM. His current research interest is in the area of parallel programming, C++ benchmark performance, object model, generic programming and template metaprogramming. He is a frequent speaker at various technical conferences and serves on the Programming Committee of Boost, and IWOMP. He holds a B.Sc from University of Toronto, and a Masters in Mathematics from University of Waterloo.

John Lakos: “Defensive Programming Done Right“

In our component-based development methodology, each developer is responsible for ensuring that the software he or she creates is easy to understand and use, and not especially easy to misuse. One common form of misuse is to invoke a library function or method under circumstances where not all of its preconditions are satisfied, leading to undefined behavior. Contracts having undefined behavior are not necessarily undesirable, and (for many engineering reasons) are often optimal. Most would agree that a well-implemented library should do something other than silently continue when a pre-condition violation is detected, although these same folks might not agree on what specific action should be taken. Unfortunately, validating preconditions implies writing additional code that will execute at runtime. More code runs slower, and some would fairly argue that they should not be forced to pay for redundant runtime checks in the library software they use. Whether and to what extent library functions should validate their preconditions, and what should happen if a precondition violation is detected are questions that are best answered on an application by application basis – i.e., by the owner of main. “Defensive Programming Done Right” makes it all possible. In this talk, we begin by reviewing the basic concepts of Design-By-Contract (DbC), and what we mean by the term “Defensive Programming” (DP). We then explore our overall approach to institutionalizing defensive programming in robust reusable library software such that each application can conveniently specify both the runtime budget (e.g., none, some, lots) for defensive checking, and also the specific action to be taken (e.g., abort, throw, spin) should a precondition violation occur. Along the way, we touch on how modern compilers and linkers work, binary compatibility, and the consequences of possibly violating the one-definition rule in mixed-mode builds. We conclude the talk by describing and then demonstrating our “negative testing” strategy (and supporting test apparatus) for readily verifying, in our component-level test drivers, that our defensive checks detect and report out-of-contract client use as intended. Actual source for the supporting utility components will be presented throughout the talk and made available afterwards.

Speaker’s bio: John Lakos, author of “Large Scale C++ Software Design.”, serves at Bloomberg LP in New York City as a senior architect and mentor for C++ Software Development world-wide. He is also an active voting member of the C++ Standards Committee, Library Working Group. Previously, Dr. Lakos directed the design and development of infrastructure libraries for proprietary analytic financial applications at Bear Stearns. For 12 years prior, Dr. Lakos developed large frameworks and advanced ICCAD applications at Mentor Graphics, for which he holds multiple software patents. His academic credentials include a Ph.D. in Computer Science (’97) and an Sc.D. in Electrical Engineering (’89) from Columbia University. Dr. Lakos received his undergraduate degrees from MIT in Mathematics (’82) and Computer Science (’81). His next book, entitled “Large-Scale C++, Volume I: Process and Architecture”, is anticipated in 2014.