I was just discussing Clang’s [[trivial_abi]] attribute with Mathias Stearn. Specifically, the fact that [[trivial_abi]] changes the Itanium ABI for trivial-ABI types so that parameters of trivial-ABI type are owned and destroyed by the callee, rather than by the caller.

Now consider two pieces of C++ code. One of them works in practice today; the other does not. Neither one is guaranteed to work. They both have implementation-defined behavior (that is, it is implementation-defined whether their behavior is undefined or not). …

On the morning of Wednesday 2018-11-07, my paper P1144R0 “Object relocation in terms of move plus destroy” was presented at the WG21 meeting in San Diego. It was presented in an early-morning session of SG17, the Evolution Working Group Incubator (EWGI), which is one of two “incubator” study groups newly formed for the San Diego meeting. (This means that it did not get seen by EWG.)

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Consider the following C++03 code (recently written by a student in a class of mine):

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This is a sequel and corollary to my previous blog post “Avoid ADL calls to functions with common names” (2018-06-17).

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Today I discovered a little book called Sudoku Stories (Oscar Seurat, 2014). Each page presents a little encyclopedia entry on some random topic accompanied by a sudoku puzzle whose pre-filled cells trace out a shape corresponding to the entry. For example:

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The C++2a standard will introduce the <version> header, which contains all the “feature macros” indicating features supported by the standard library. So if you live in the year 2035 and compile for a lot of different compilers, all of which support at least the bare bones of C++2a, <version> might soon be your best friend.

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On GCC bug 87106, Marc Glisse raises the following interesting example:

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People keep asking me if I’ll be at the WG21 meeting in San Diego this November. No, I won’t; I have a prior commitment elsewhere.

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Lately I’ve been reading Samuel Hopkins Adams’ investigative journalism piece The Great American Fraud (serialized in Collier’s, 1905–1906). Adams inveighs against the scourge of “patent medicines” that were in most cases neither patented, nor medicines, but rather delivery vehicles for alcohol or worse.

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I presented P1144 “Object relocation in terms of move plus destroy” at the SG14 working meeting on 2018-09-26. Here are three questions that came up during the Q&A and which have come up before; I thought I’d put them into a little FAQ for quick reference.

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I presented P1144 “Object relocation in terms of move plus destroy” at the SG14 working meeting on 2018-09-26. I was also pleasantly surprised by the number of shout-outs the idea received at CppCon in general — including in Mark Elendt’s keynote. (The specific shout-out to “std::trivially_relocatable in the pipeline” is at 42m00s. I did talk with Mark later on and point out that “in the pipeline” is an extremely generous way to describe the situation!)

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On two occasions I have been asked,— “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” … I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. …

Tonight at CppCon, Ezra Chung gave a lightning talk on what he called “perfect forwarding and perfect backwarding.” Perfect forwarding, as we all know, is when you receive an argument from above and pass it downward with the same value category; Ezra’s “perfect backwarding,” then, is when you receive a return value from below and pass it upward with the same value category.

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I’m at CppCon this week. It’s great. You should be here too. (If you are — come say hello in person! I hope you’re having fun so far.)

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In our previous installment, I called the following (not-yet-valid C++2a) idiom a “poor man’s version” of member concepts:

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I continue, very slowly, to work on my CppCon 2018 session “Concepts As She Is Spoke.” A while back, someone on the C++ Slack channel asked whether it was possible to have either “template concept parameters” or “member concepts” — that is, either

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People say “always catch exceptions by const reference,” which I think is good advice. I’ve worked on at least one codebase that catches by non-const reference, presumably just because it’s shorter to type. This has never caused any problem for them in practice, as far as I know. But in theory, it’s a bad idea, because in C++ it is possible to construct a program where two different catch-blocks, executing concurrently, actually reference the exact same exception object. In that situation, any mutation to the exception object will cause a data race. The easiest way to prevent the race is to prevent mutation: to catch by const reference!

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Following up on my previous post titled “The Yellowbird Mistake”…

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This post is about Binary Homeworlds, the “space chess” game invented by John Cooper and popularized by (among others) Andy Looney. You can play Homeworlds online at SuperDuperGames. Sadly a full rules explanation is out of scope for this blog post, but maybe sometime. In this post I just want to talk about a specific tactical error that (sigh) I keep making.

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I’ll just leave this here.

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