This post is also available in Italian. Note to self: Never try to modify your examples in realtime during a presentation, to show an idea that just came through your mind: You might succeed. The problem We have an old pre-C++11 class: As you can see, class C contains a function get() which returns a …
Continue reading Optimizing return valuesC++
This post is also available in Italian. As stated in a previous post, final keyword enables the sealing of classes and methods. This is important because it allows interesting compile-time checks, but also enables quite a powerful optimization: the devirtualization. Devirtualization happens when the compiler can statically decide, at compile time, which function should be called, so it can produce …
Continue reading The power of devirtualizationI’m not posting anything since GDC, and the reason is that I’m not working on C++ very much lately, because I’m quite busy in trying to make some sense out of the shamanic art they call deep learning. Luckily I’ve been invited to talk at the Italian C++ Day in Firenze on October 29th (http://www.italiancpp.org/event/cppday16/, …
Continue reading A digression…NOTE (2016/03/26 01:30PM): The content of this post has has been fixed. I must thank Lawrence Crowl for pointing out my mistake at SG14 GDC 2016 meeting. It is well known that using ordering comparison operators (<, <=, >, >=) with mixed signed/unsigned types result in warnings and, ultimately, in undefinedunexpected behaviour. I never loved this, and I …
Continue reading Signed/Unsigned operations and undefined behaviourDiscussing with another C++ programmer, we came out with this piece of code: #include <iostream> template <class… Args> void foo(int, Args…) { std::cout << “1”; } template <class…Args> void foo(Args…, int) { std::cout << “2”; } int main() { foo(11); // A foo<>(11); // B foo(11, 33); // C foo<int>(11, 33); // D foo(11, 22, 33); // E foo<int, int>(11, 22, 33); // F } I was pretty convinced that all the calls to foo were ambiguous, so I decided to test it with different …
Continue reading Curiosity #20160225A nullptr is a representation of the null pointer that implicitly converts into any pointer type, but not into an integral type. nullptr, and its type nullptr_t, have been standardised in C++11, but its introduction predates the standard by at least 15 years, since the idea is contained in Scott Meyer‘s book Effective C++, 2nd edition, published in 1996. Despite …
Continue reading Use nullptr if you can, 0 if you need, but please don’t use NULLI’m preparing some slides to explain how to write better code with C++11/14, and I wanted to start from the last thing I wrote about here, the use of keywords final and override. The scope of my previous post, albeit a bit cryptic, was to show how those keywords are context-sensitive, so you can also use final and override as type names, as …
Continue reading Final & Override againnamespace override { class override { }; class override_final { ::override::override override; public: virtual ::override::override & final() { return override; } }; } namespace final { class final final : public override::override { }; class final_override final : public override::override_final { ::final::final override; public: ::final::final & final() override final { return override; } }; } …
Continue reading Please, use final and override!Naming a method after the class Consider this class: struct B { B() {} int B() { return 42; } // FAIL! }; This code is illegal because a method name can’t be named after the class name. I was wondering if there’s a particular reason for this, since it’s a restriction you can easily overcome by writing: struct …
Continue reading Naming restrictions for methods in C++In these days I’m porting a library from Qt4 to Qt5, and here’s how sticking to C++11 syntax has helped me catching a subtle porting problem. I had a class subclassing QTcpServer, overriding a virtual method with this syntax: void incomingConnection(int descriptor) override; Specifying the method as override was enough to discover a breaking change in …
Continue reading Override and errors