Who
Aaron Ballman is a Principal Compiler Engineer for Intel and is the lead maintainer of the Clang open source compiler. He has two decades of experience writing cross-platform frameworks in C/C++, compiler & language design, and software engineering best practices and is currently a voting member of the C (WG14) and C++ (WG21) standards committees.
In case you can't figure it out easily enough, the views expressed here are my personal views and not the views of my employer, my past employers, my future employers, or some random person on the street. Please yell only at me if you disagree with what you read.
Monthly Archives: July 2011
Discriminated Unions
In computer science, a discriminated union is one of the many names given to the concept of a “catch-all” datatype. (You’ll also hear it referred to as a variant.) It’s meant to hold data of any type at any given … Continue reading
Opaque Data Pointers
Most of the frameworks that I work on need to be usable from multiple programming languages (typically, C++, C# and Objective-C, but sometimes more). This means I must target the lowest common denominator in terms of the function prototypes, so … Continue reading
Inline Namespaces
One of the neat, new language features of C++0x that is targeted firmly at framework designers is the ability to declare “inline” namespaces. While the name may seem a bit strange at first, the concept is quite intuitive. It allows … Continue reading
Returning Stack-Based Values
The code looks innocuous enough, but something as simple as this can be the source of hard to track down bugs. I want to talk a bit about the dangers of returning stack-based values.
Exceptions in Frameworks
Exceptions are a topic near and dear to my heart, mostly because I have some strong opinions about the benefits and disadvantages of exceptions. But this isn’t a blog posting about whether exceptions are good or not. Instead, this is … Continue reading
Warning: Don’t Ignore Warnings!
How many times have you run across code that looks fine, works fine, but still generates a message like “Signed/unsigned mismatch” when we compile it? How many times have you thought to yourself, “that’s stupid, I know this code is … Continue reading
Calling Instance Methods in WMI
It’s pretty rare that I wind up using WMI from a C++ application, but when I’ve done so in the past, it’s been a straightforward process. The documentation in MSDN is generally adequate, and their example projects tend to lead … Continue reading
Reconstructing a Corrupted Stack Crawl
For my day job, I frequently look at reports that come out of WinQual from Microsoft. These reports contain crash dumps that I can use to determine what’s going wrong with the software I’ve been working on. All in all, … Continue reading
Move Semantics
One of the new features in C++0x is a way to express move semantics. This is a sensible piece of sibling functionality to copy semantics, which you’ve likely already run into. When writing copy semantics for a class, the idea … Continue reading
