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

Please take the quick survey on concept syntax at the end of this article. Did you know that the Concept TS was merged into the Working Draft in July 2017, in Toronto? And we are a Planck length away from merging the Range TS in C++20 as well, including a few goodies such as projections, contiguous ranges/iterators and ranges adaptors? We also added a bunch of general-purpose concepts in the std namespace in Rapperswil. Read more

This was my first committee meeting. I arrived Sunday morning at Jona, the next town over where I had a lovely AirBnB in a very nice, peaceful suburb. I settled to visit Rapperswil but met some people from Nvidia going to the meeting. So we naturally started to talk about C++. The meeting was to last 6 days and until the very end, we talked about C++, every minute of every hour. Read more