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

As I left Rapperswil earlier this year, I said very firmly that I would not go to the San Diego Meeting. Crossing an ocean to work on C++ 12 hours a day for a week is indeed madness. And so naturally, I found myself in a San Diego hotel straight from the 60s, to do some C++ for a week. With the exception of the author of this blog, all people there are incredibly smart and energetic, and so a lot of great work was done. Read more

C++ Modules are going through the standardization process and current plans would have them merged in the C++ Standard in time for C++20. They are a great language feature, offering a number of benefits over headers They feel more modern They are much faster to parse They provide protections against macros They provide some protections against ODR violations. I really can’t wait to be able to replace headers with them in my code bases. Read more

Let say you have some struct square you want to compute the area of. struct square { int width; } You could of course do that: int area(square s) { return s.width * s.width; } But, your friend Tony told you to use more functions, so instead you do that int area(square s) { return width(s) * width(s); } int width(square s) { return s.width; } area being the function you really care about it is defined first - after all, code reads from top to bottom. Read more

In this article, we talk about Auto Non-Static Data Member Initializers in C++. All code snippet can be tested on Compiler Explorer thanks to Matt Godbolt and the CE team. The clang patch to enable this feature was authored by Faisal Vali 5 years ago, but I have crudely rebased it on top of clang trunk (~ 7.0). In fact, the main motivation for this article is to put this feature in the hand of people to prove that it works and that it would be a great addition to the standard. Read more