April 27, 2019

Characters sets: A bad idea since the bronze age

You who shall hereafter see this tablet, which I have written, or these sculptures, do not destroy them, but preserve them so long as you live! In 522 BC, 𐎭𐎠𐎼𐎹𐎢𐏁 also known as Dārīus was king of the Persian Empire. Kings crave fame as they do power and so Darius (who the greek later called Δαρεῖος) had his henchmen carve his name in stone. One such stone is the Behistun Inscription, which is really more a mountain than a stone. Read more

February 28, 2019

Kona: A trip report

I was lucky enough to participate in a third wg21 committee meeting in a row, this time in Kona, Hawaii, a mere 13000 kilometers away. Kona As is tradition, Bryce and others wrote a rather thorough trip report on Reddit and you should check it out. However, if you want to read more details about my experience and some of the proposals I find important, please read on (knowing that your time is limited, and doing so will leave less time to read other blog posts). Read more

January 6, 2019

What is C++ ?

These past few weeks have been quite difficult for me. I have therefore not followed closely the ongoing discussions about C++, ranges, game developers and iota. I’m afraid my current outlook on things is rather cynical and I’ve been told I might be too assertive and opinionated. So, rather than another exercise in quixotism, or a pointless opinion on how best name a function that creates a sequence, let me ask a few questions. Read more

December 6, 2018

Towards Better C++ Modules - Part 2: Modules naming

In case you have been napping, in the last installment we talked about modules mapping, and so now we must talk about modules naming. You see, modules have names and names are hard. In this case, names serve to identify uniquely each module used through the program. The end of this article proposes to govern module naming through an official WG21 standing document and I would love your opinion. But be patient! Read more

November 26, 2018

Towards Better C++ Modules - Part 1: Modules mapping

In this blog post, we will talk about modules mapping. Modules mapping is a mechanism by which is a module name is associated with the source file that defines that module’s interface. A module is closed and self-contained. Which mean that for every module name there must exist one and only source file defining that module. Module mapping is not useful to the compiler per-say. By the time the compiler encounters an import declaration, the module binary interface must exist and be known to the compiler. Read more

November 25, 2018

RangeOf: A better span

I don’t like span. Since that article was posted, the committee improved span quite a bit by removing operator== and making it’s size() consistent with that of vector after a lot of discussions. And I mean a lot. What is span: 30 seconds refresher If you have N T laid out contiguously in memory, you can build a span<T> over them. Span being a value type you can move it around, copy it and so forth. Read more