C++

C++ allows you to pack bit fields. This isn’t something I’ve used as it seems to have some very specific use cases and is platform dependent (also see bit field notes).

From Stephen Kelly’s YouTube video and blog link, a quick overview of modern, reusable CMake: what we should use, and what we should not, for composable and terse CMake.

Some useful C++11/14 links

• On the behaviour of copy(-ing) constructors in C++ 11
• The “Rule of Three” becomes the “Rule of Five” in C++11
• The “Safe Bool Idiom”

If you’re new to C++11, this post on Stackoverflow answers the question “How do I pass a unique_ptr argument to a constructor or a function?” going through each case:

• by value
• by non-const l-value reference
• by const l-value reference
• by r-value reference

I’ve just watched Herb Sutter‘s talk on C++ in Visual Studio 2013 and onwards.

The last quarter of the talk was concerned with Microsoft introducing the __async and __await keywords in a similar implementation to that already used in C#, note the __ prefix.

As he explained, this is going to be an implementation of a proposed feature for inclusion in a future version of C++, much like the modules feature currently being implemented in CLang.

The Visual Studio roadmap was intertesting, but it looks like we’re going to have to wait a while for generic lambdas.