I’m about two weeks late posting this, but two more C++ and Beyond 2012 videos are now available online.

The first is my concurrency talk:

C++ and Beyond 2012: C++ Concurrency (Herb Sutter)

I’ve spoken and written on these topics before. Here’s what’s different about this talk:

• Brand new: This material goes beyond what I’ve written and taught about before in my Effective Concurrency articles and courses.
• Cutting-edge current: It covers the best-practices state of the art techniques and shipping tools, and what parts of that are standardized in C++11 already (the answer to that one may surprise you!) and what’s en route to near-term standardization and why, with coverage of the latest discussions.
• Blocking vs. non-blocking: What’s the difference between blocking and non-blocking styles, why on earth would you care, which kinds does C++11 support, and how are we looking at rounding it out in C++1y?

The answers all matter to you – even the ones not yet in the C++ standard – because they are real, available in shipping products, and affect how you design your software today.

The second is one of the panels:

C++ and Beyond 2012: Panel – Convincing your Colleagues

From C++ and Beyond 2012, Andrei, Herb and Scott present Convincing Your Colleagues – an interactive panel.

Abstract:

You can’t do a better job if you don’t change what you’re doing, but change is hard.  It’s especially hard when what needs to change is your colleagues’ approach to software development. Moving your team forward often requires persuading your peers to change their behavior, sometimes to do something they’re not doing, other times to stop doing something they’ve become accustomed to.  Whether the issue is to embrace or avoid C++ language features, to adopt new development tools or abandon old ones, to increase use of or scale back on overuse of design patterns, to adhere to coding standards, or any of the plethora of other matters that affect software creation, moving things forward typically requires getting your colleagues to buy into the change you’re proposing.  But how can you do that?

In this panel session, Andrei, Herb, and Scott share how they go about convincing their colleagues to change and take questions from the audience.

Truth be told, the panel ranged widely and probably most of the time was on other topics!

I hope you find them useful.

With the help of friends Robert Seacord and David Svoboda of CERT in particular, I posted a note and link to their CERT post today because people have been misunderstanding the recent Java vulnerabilities, thinking they’re somehow really C or C++ vulnerabilities because Java is implemented in C and C++.

From the post:

Are the Java vulnerabilities actually C and C++ vulnerabilities?

by Herb Sutter

 

You’ve probably seen the headlines:

[US-CERT] Java in Web Browser: Disable Now!

We’ve been telling people to disable Java for years. … We have confirmed that VU#625617 can be used to reliably execute code on Windows, OS X, and Linux platforms. And the exploit code for the vulnerability is publicly available and already incorporated into exploit kits. This should be enough motivation for you to turn Java off.

Firefox and Apple have blocked Java while U.S. Homeland Security recommends everyone disable it, because of vulnerabilities

Homeland Security still advises disabling Java, even after update

Some people have asked whether last week’s and similar recent Java vulnerabilities are actually C or C++ vulnerabilities – because, like virtually all modern systems software, Java is implemented in C and C++.

The answer is no, these particular exploits are pure Java. Some other exploits have indeed used vulnerabilities in Java’s native C code implementation, but the major vulnerabilities in the news lately are in Java itself, and they enable portable exploits on any operating system with a single program. …

Some other C++ experts who have better sense than I do won’t add the following bit publicly, but I can’t help myself: Insert “write once, pwn everywhere” joke here…

At C++ and Beyond in August, I gave a 30 min talk on the changed meaning of const and mutable. The talk video is now online:

You Don’t Know [keyword] and [keyword]

const means const.

Bonus: mutable is useful and continues to mean ‘already as good as const.’

This is another way C++ has become simpler: const now means what people always thought it meant, and the four-line code example doesn’t need deep analysis at all – it just works.

But we analyze the four-line example anyway as a motivating case to see why and how it works, so we can fully appreciate this new simplification in C++11…