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: declarations
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
Destructors
Destructors are one of those inescapable concepts in C++. We’ve all used them, many times without even really thinking about it. But how do destructors work? What can and can’t you do with destructors? There’s a lot more complexity to … Continue reading
Virtual Inheritance
A question came up on LinkedIn in the C++ group relating to how virtual class inheritance actually works. Since LinkedIn limits the amount of space for responses, and also manages to screw up code formatting, I decided to tackle the … Continue reading
How DLL Imports Work
When you make a function call into a function that exists in a DLL, what happens, exactly? How does the function call happen, and what work goes on behind the scenes to make it so? I want to cover some … 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
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
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.
Deleted Class Methods
One of the new features in C++0x is a declaration syntax allowing you to remove methods from a class entirely. While this may sound rather strange at first blush, it does have some interesting usages that will make your code … Continue reading
