Two More C&B Sessions: C++0x Memory Model (Scott) and Exceptional C++0x (me)

Scott Meyers, Andrei Alexandrescu and I are continuing to craft and announce the technical program for C++ and Beyond (C&B) 2011, and two more sessions are now posted. All talks are brand-new material created specifically for C&B 2011. Here are short blurbs; follow the links for longer descriptions.

• Scott will give a great new talk on “The C++0x Memory Model and Why You Care” that will cover topics of interest to anybody who cares about concurrency and parallel programming under C++0x: everything from compiler optimizations and memory access reorderings, to “sequenced before” and “happens before” relations, to atomic types and memory consistency models, and how they all relate to both correctness and performance. This is stuff that in a perfect world nobody should ever have to know, but in our actual world every modern C++ developer who cares about correct high-performance code has to understand it thoroughly.
• I’ll be giving a brand-new talk  “Exceptional C++0x (aka C++11)” that shows how the new features in C++0x change the way we solve problems, our C++ coding style, and even the way we think about our code. I’ll demonstrate that with code that works today on existing compilers, using selected familiar examples from my Exceptional C++ books. This is not rehashed material, as I’ll assume you’re already familiar with the pre-C++0x solutions (I’ll provide links to read as refreshers before the course), and then we’ll analyze and solve them entirely the 21st-century C++ way and see why C++0x feels like a whole new fresh language that leads to different approaches, new and changed guidelines, and even better solutions. As Bjarne put it: “Surprisingly, C++0x feels like a new language: The pieces just fit together better than they used to and I find a higher-level style of programming more natural than before and as efficient as ever.” This talk will show why — deeply, madly, and truly.

The other two talks already announced are the following, which I previously reported last week:

• Andrei will be giving an in-depth talk on “BIG: C++ Strategies, Data Structures, and Algorithms Aimed at Scalability.” Briefly, it’s about writing high-performance C++ code for  highly distributed architectures, focusing on translating C++’s strong modeling capabilities directly to great scaling and/or great savings, and finding the right but non-intuitive C++ techniques and data structures to get there.
• I’ll be giving a brand-new talk on “C++ and the GPU… and Beyond.” I’ll cover the state of the art for using C++ (not just C) for general-purpose computation on graphics processing units (GPGPU). The first half of the talk discusses the most important issues and techniques to consider when using GPUs for high-performance computation, especially where we have to change our traditional advice for doing the same computation on the CPU. The second half focuses on upcoming C++ language and library extensions that bring key abstractions for GPGPU — and in time considerably more — directly into C++.

I hope to see many of you there this August. Last year’s event sold out during the early-bird period, and although we’ve increased the attendance cap this year to make room for more, if you’re interested in coming you may want to register soon to reserve a place.