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: undefined behavior
Understanding Undefined Behavior
One of the harder concepts for people to understand in C++, in my opinion, is “behavior.” In C++, the language has some very specific wording for what the various behaviors are, and I’ve seen a lot of people get them … Continue reading
Crashing: Easy to Do When You Don’t Want to, Hard When You Do
The challenge: in C or C++, come up with a way to crash your application, running as little code as possible. It should be a cross-platform solution that works with any compiler, on any system, with any CPU architecture.
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
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
