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.
Category Archives: C/C++
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
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
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
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
The Things You Spot During Code Reviews
I was doing an informal code review the other day, and I ran into some code that I thought would make a fascinating blog post. It had to do with a pure virtual destructor declaration, followed by the same destructor’s … Continue reading
Hiding in Plain Sight
Sometimes, the hardest bugs to find are the ones that hide in plain sight. They’re the sort of bug where your eyes skim over the offending code and your brain continuously says “yup, fine, right, good, yup” and you can’t … Continue reading
Function Pointer Basics
At their core, functions are nothing more than a location in memory with some special semantics attached to them. The assumption is that the location in memory is the start of some machine code to be executed, and that there … Continue reading
Allocations and Exceptions
One of the things I dislike about many programming languages are exceptions. They go against the natural flow of thinking for most programmers. We tend to think of code as flowing in one direction only: forward. But with exceptions, code … Continue reading
When Should You Use const_cast?
C++ provides an explicit casting mechanism called const_cast, and yet the question pops up: when would I ever use this? You can always assign a non-const value to a const value without requiring a cast operation. So you don’t need … Continue reading
When Const isn’t Const, it’s Mutable
I’m a programmer who strives to write const-correct code. I’ll admit that it can be challenging, but once you get used to doing it, your code is generally cleaner and more maintainable. This happens at the expense of flexibility. When … Continue reading
