Trip Report: CppCon 2014

9 thoughts on “Trip Report: CppCon 2014”

1. Just watched “Back to the Basics! Essentials of Modern C++ Style”. Although I generally enjoyed the talk, I have a couple of comments.

   The first is about inout parameters should be using refs. I tend to agree with Google’s style that there should never be any non-const ref paramaters because it isn’t obvious when using a function with a non-const ref parameter that it may modify that parameter since the call looks the same as if it were passed an in parameter.

   That being said, the logical “fix” to use pointers for inout parameters is also imperfect because it introduces two side-effects:
   1) pointers can be null while references cannot which adds ambiguity the the method signature because this may be an optional parameter (Can I pass null?)
   2) the parameter can be confused with an out parameter. Although it could be argued that out parameters should be replaced with return tuples + tie().

   That’s one of the shortcomings of C++ where it’s non-trivial to show usage intent of parameters that languages like C#, D etc. have long fixed by introducing keywords.

   The second is about always return by value. The same argument that was made for not passing arguments by value to sink functions (not efficient when used in a tight loop because you can’t reuse instance for strings and vectors) also applies to returning by value. I feel the talk should have addressed this case as well.

2. @pauljurczak I think that would be a bad idea, because then typos would accidentally declare new variables and the code would silently ‘work’. There are languages that do this and they are not suitable for large programs in part due to this problem.

3. It looks like something ate the code between angle brackets, so here is the plain text version of my post:

   I enjoyed watching your “Back to the Basics! Essentials of Modern C++ Style” presentation where you advocated almost always using “auto” in declarations. How about following this and Occam’s razor idea to its logical conclusion and skipping redundant “auto” altogether. The first use of a variable on the left side is it’s declaration, as if there was an “auto” preceding it. Is this a completely silly idea?

4. I enjoyed watching your “Back to the Basics! Essentials of Modern C++ Style” presentation where you advocated almost always using in declarations. How about following this and Occam’s razor idea to its logical conclusion and skipping redundant altogether. The first use of a variable on the left side is it’s declaration, as if there was an preceding it. Is this a completely silly idea?

5. Herb,

   I asked a question related to something you covered in one of your CppCon talks over on stackoverflow.com

   http://stackoverflow.com/questions/26147491/whats-the-correct-enable-if-constraint-on-perfect-forwarding-setter#26149100

   During the discussion it became apparent to me that it’s not clear if you intend your perfect forwarding set_name() function to accept string literals or not. I started out with the impression that you did want to accept string literals, but on further viewing I notice that you never actually say that.

   So, did you intend the following to work, or do you have some reason to disallow it (perhaps the reason outline by one of the stackoverflow answers)?

   employee e;
   e.set_name(“Bob”);

6. The videos are starting to be published now. Here’s the link to the channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/CppCon.

7. If I remember right they said video recordings would be available within a month or two. They are likely to be announced at cppcon.org when available.

8. where and when will the video recordings be available online ? if any ?

9. Should have posted your dance video, too. It is an instant success on FaceBook :). More viral than the iCloud leaks. ;)

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