This is both a follow-up to my CppCon talk and the ongoing ABI saga, which I do not expect to end any time soon. I hope this article to be the first in a series I hope to write over the next few months. A quick reminder, ABI is akin to a binary protocol and decides how your types are laid out in memory, how functions are mangled and are called. Read more

In this article, I present a few language features that I am hoping to see in C++23 and which I have deployed to Compiler Explorer. Please note that these features are not part of a working draft and they have not been presented to the C++ committee yet, so it is impossible to comment on whether any of them might land in 23 or not! Auto Non-Static Data Members Initializers A while back I presented auto non-static data members initializers. Read more

Following a blog post by Herb Sutter, let me tell you how and when I use references. If I do not need to mutate an input parameter, I will use a const reference, unless I know that copying is cheaper (When in doubt use a reference). If I do need a copy of the parameter, I accept it by value and move it If I do need to mutate an input parameter, I will accept an input reference. Read more

In Prague, the C++ committee took a series of polls on whether to break ABI, and decided not to. There was no applause. But I’m not sure we fully understood what we did and the consequences it could have. I do believe none of the consequences will be good. What is ABI ABI is the shared understanding libraries have about how your program is serialized, both in term of layout, calling convention and mangling. Read more

C++20 has shipped! C++ is better and more alive than it has ever been. You might have read on the Internet (rarely a good idea), that C++ grows too fast, too complicated, too big. I do not think this is true. Bjarne Stroustrup reminded us that concepts are mentioned in Design and Evolution of C++, a book written in 1994, before even the first C++ standard. Coroutines and Modules are also old ideas that represent more than a decade of work. Read more

std::move doesn’t move. It casts to an rvalue-reference, which is a type of reference that can be passed to a move constructor or assignment operator, if one exists. template <typename T> decltype(auto) move(T&& a) { return static_cast<std::remove_reference_t<T>&&>(a); } Some expressions will be converted to rvalue-references automatically, when the compiler is certain that the value is expiring (will not be reused). This is the case for temporaries or non-reference objects returned from functions. Read more

This article is the sequel to A Universal Async Abstraction for C++, in which I talk about the Executor proposal targeting C++23. Quite a bit happened since then. SG-11, the study group charged of all things concurrency and parallelism made forward progress and sent the proposal to LEWG - with the hope of landing a future revision in the C++23 draft. This is rather big news given that this work has been brewing for about a decade. Read more