Here’s a puzzle for you: How do you write a class without a copy constructor? …

Previously on this blog:

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I’ve spent too many hours repeatedly trying to find this information on the Web. Time to write it down.

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A lot of templates in the C++ standard library are specified with Constraints: elements, which means that the library vendor must ensure that they drop out of overload resolution when their constraints are not met — but the Standard does not mandate any particular mechanism by which the vendor must implement that dropping-out. Two possible mechanisms are SFINAE using std::enable_if, and adding C++20 constraints using the requires keyword.

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My lovely wife and I have just moved house, and while boxing up the contents of my desk I ran across physical paper copies of two weakly themed crosswords I made in 2011. Might as well immortalize them in the digital realm…

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Via Hacker News: lecture notes from several of Tim Roughgarden’s courses at Stanford, particularly CS269I “Incentives in Computer Science.” They’re worth reading from start to finish. Here are two gems I thought were especially neat.

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A few months ago, Matheus Izvekov implemented my WG21 proposal P2266 “Simpler Implicit Move” in Clang. As of Clang 13, it’s enabled by default under -std=c++2b.

We’ve received some feedback from the field already (leading up to the Clang 13 release). Here are the punch lines as far as I can recall. These examples will all appear in P2266R2, whenever I get around to submitting it.

Many thanks to Matheus Izvekov for the implementation, and to Stephan Bergmann for reporting these issues! …

I hope by now everybody knows not to forward-declare standard library types. For example, this code (Godbolt) is wrong:

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(Hat tip to Louis Dionne and Tim Song for bringing this up in a libc++ review, and then explaining it enough that I think I got it.)

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You’ve heard of the Mandelbrot set, right? Basically, for each point \(c\) on the complex plane, we iterate the function \(z = z^2+c\) and color the point \(c\) based on how many steps it takes until \(\lvert z\rvert\geq 2\) (which is known as “diverging” or “escaping”).

I recently learned of another visualization called the “Buddhabrot,” originally discovered by Melinda Green. In the Buddhabrot, you color each complex point \(t\) based on the number of times that \(t\) is visited by the escaping trajectories of all points \(c\). As Wikipedia says, this produces a graph of “the probability distribution over the trajectories of points that escape.”

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I was just reading Plato’s Cratylus (see also its Stanford Encyclopedia article). In it, (Plato’s version of) Socrates talks about choosing good names:

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Consider the following code snippet (Godbolt). Would you believe that it compiles on MSVC (with Microsoft’s STL) but not on libc++ or libstdc++?

template<class C>
struct Wrap {
    Wrap(C&);
    operator C::iterator() const;
};

template<class C>
void f(C&, typename C::const_iterator);

int main() {
    std::list<int> v;
    f(v, Wrap(v));
} ...

I’ve mentioned the priority_tag trick a couple of times in previous posts; it’s time I did a post specifically on this trick.

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Today, while inventing questions for my next C++ Pub Quiz, I ran into a fairly obscure and meaningless divergence among vendors’ implementations of vector<bool>::reference. Given:

std::vector<bool> v = {true, true};

The correct way to swap v[0] with v[1] is of course swap(v[0], v[1]), optionally preceded by using std::swap; see “What is the std::swap two-step?” (2020-07-11). But look at all these wrong things you can try! …

In my CppCon 2018 talk “Concepts As She Is Spoke,” I presented some pitfalls in requires-clause syntax, such as:

template<class T>
concept HasHash = requires (const T& t) {
    t.hash() -> std::integral;
};

struct X { int hash() const; };
static_assert(!HasHash<X>);

On the cpplang Slack today, John Eivind Helset and Eugenio Bargiacchi (inadvertently) showed me a new trap I hadn’t seen before: …

In Bjarne Stroustrup’s paper P0557R1 “Concepts: The Future of Generic Programming” (January 2017), section 6 is titled “Concept Overloading,” which Stroustrup distinguishes from the traditional approach “using helper functions and tag dispatch.” More subtly, Stroustrup seems to distinguish between true “overloading” (asking the compiler to resolve among multiple viable overloads) and other means of giving-two-things-the-same-name:

Where we cannot overload, we need to use workarounds (e.g., traits, enable_if, or helper functions).

I’ll present two problems, each with two solutions (one in C++11 and one in C++20), which I think illustrate something interesting about “concept overloading” versus… other things. …

A few weeks ago, I read René Daumal’s A Night of Serious Drinking (published as La grande beuverie 1938; translated by David Coward and E.A. Lovatt 1979). I recommend it; it’s a fun and erudite satire — sort of a less political Gulliver’s Travels or a less bitter Jurgen. At times it made me think, “This is clearly an allegory… but of what?” and at other times “Is he satirizing bad scientists, bad writers, bad artists? or all scientists, all writers, all artists?”

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The schedule for C++ on Sea 2021 has been announced! The “conference day” involves two tracks of five talks each, plus a keynote by Barbara Geller and Ansel Sermersheim. The two “workshop days” offer… well, you should sign up for my own two-day training class, at which point the other offerings are moot. But, just for the record, the two available two-day classes are:

• Arthur O’Dwyer’s “Modern STL Programming”

• Anthony Williams’ “More Concurrent Thinking in C++”

If you don’t do a two-day class, then on Wednesday you can choose among these options: …

Previously on this blog:

• “A metaprogramming puzzle: Overly interoperable libraries” (2021-05-19)

• “Overly interoperable libraries, part 2” (2021-05-22)

Jason Cobb has sent me a proposal that I think meets all the requirements and therefore qualifies as a complete solution!

Unlike the ideas in my previous posts, Jason’s solution doesn’t depend on “GUIDs” at all. It’s based on a simple idea that is, in hindsight, quite obvious. …

I continue participating in Zartaj Majeed’s book club on Knuth’s The Art of Computer Programming, previously mentioned in “Bubblesort, rocksort, cocktail-shaker sort” (2020-12-13). The past couple of weeks, we’ve been looking at section 5.2.3, “Sorting by selection,” in which the problem of repeatedly selecting the max element leads Knuth to investigate priority queues.

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