Who
Aaron Ballman is a Senior Staff Compiler Engineer for Intel. He has almost 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.
Category Archives: C/C++
Describing the MSVC ABI for Structure Return Types
An ABI is an “application binary interface”, which is basically a contract between pieces of executable code on how to behave. The ABI dictates things like how parameters are passed, where return values go, how to create and destroy stack … Continue reading
Varargs? More like Arghargs!
This was a silly mistake on my part, but one which took me several hours to track down. In retrospect, I had everything at my disposal to tell me exactly what the problem was, I just didn’t notice it. It … Continue reading
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Worst Compiler Abuse Ever
I am pretty sure this qualifies as the worst abuse of a compiler I can think of. Note, I am not recommending you use this in production code, lest you wish to be set on fire by those who have … Continue reading
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I Learned Something New About New
In my last post, I had mentioned that I found a phenomenon that made no sense to me. It had to do with initializing the members of a structure when calling new. Since I can’t let sleeping dogs lie, I … Continue reading
Tail Calls
A tail call is a specific pattern of source code where the last instruction executed in a method is another function call. For instance: In this code, the call to last is considered a tail call because there are no … Continue reading
Whining about iterators
In the STL, there are multiple classes of iterators: random access, bidirectional, forward, input, and output. I’d like to discuss the different types of iterators in a bit more detail, so that I can whine about “missing” functionality.
Stupid Compiler Tricks
A coworker approached me today with an interesting problem and I figured I’d talk about the crazy acrobatics that solved it. He wanted to fill out a list of operations to perform that could be registered easily “at compile time”, … Continue reading
The Amazing Visitor Pattern
I’m a big proponent of using design patterns whenever they are the proper tool for the job. One of the design patterns I find myself pulling out of the toolbox fairly frequently these days is the visitor design pattern. However, … Continue reading
A simple introduction to type traits
Type traits are a slightly more advanced topic in C++ because it they are heavily used in template metaprogramming. However, it is not an impenetrable concept, and it comes with some great benefits if you like to write generic, reusable … Continue reading
An Almost Useful Language Extension
While fiddling around a bit with clang, I came across an interesting C++ language extension from Microsoft. If you’ve done library development on Windows, you’ve likely come across the __declspec keyword for things like importing and exporting symbols from a … Continue reading
