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.
Author Archives: Aaron Ballman
How to Check Access Rights
Given that everyone is always pushing for better security mechanisms, I’m always surprised at how incredibly difficult the simple tasks can be in the Win32 security model. At work, we have an application that wants to do the right thing … Continue reading
The Placement New Operator
I’d like to shed a little bit of light on a dusty corner of the C++ language: there’s more than one “new” operator! Well, since you’ve likely encountered the vector new (new[]) operator, I should say there’s more than two … Continue reading
The comma
As C and C++ programmers, we’ve probably seen and used the comma countless times in our applications, without thinking too much about it. However, there are some very interesting points to this piece of punctuation that are worth discussing. The … Continue reading
The Joys of Bit Fields
In C and C++, bit fields are one of the more odd declaration types that you run into rarely. The basic idea behind them is to provide the programmer with a way to define declarations at the bit-level. For instance, … Continue reading
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
