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.
Tag Archives: C++0x
Member Function Ref Qualifiers
One of the lesser-known features of C++11 is the fact that you can overload your non-static member functions based on whether the implicit this object parameter is an lvalue reference or an rvalue reference by specifying a functions ref-qualifier. This … Continue reading
Value Types in C++11
You may have heard these terms used for various programming languages before, but I wanted to discuss them in a bit more detail since they’re a fairly fundamental concept in compilers that spill over into the way you use the … 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
Static asserts
One of the new features of C++11 is the ability to do a compile-time assertions. These assert functions are similar in concept to the runtime assert functions we all know and love. You pass in a constant expression and a … Continue reading
Contextual Keywords
I believe the C++ standards committee got some things wrong in the distant past. Converting constructors work implicitly with an assignment operation, function hiding and overriding are not explicit, there’s no way to prevent a subclass from providing further overrides … Continue reading
Understanding Attributes
The new C++11 standard includes the ability to specify “attributes” for various declarations. The concept of attributes will be familiar to you if you’ve done work in languages like C# or Java. However, there are major differences between C++ attributes … Continue reading
List Initialization
One of the new features in C++0x has been to make a consistent mechanism for initialization via a list. In previous versions of C++, it was inconsistent how you would initialize lists which would lead to a small amount of … 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
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
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
