Agenda: C++ - Overview Of New Language Features (Around C++20)

The audience consists of professional programmers who are not new to C++. As such, rather than reinforcing each topic through exercises, it is more important to discuss matters and to develop a common knowledge and a common sense.

Throughout the training, the presentation style will be live-coding-by-trainer, falling back to a traditional frontal presentation style where applicable.

Didactic High Speed

Smart Pointers

Move Semantics, Rvalue References is a complex topic to explain. A smart pointer overview is a good thing to have anyway. Lets start with that, and - through std::unique_ptr - get insight in what moving is from a user’s point of view.

From Smart Pointers: std::unique_ptr, std::shared_ptr (And std::weak_ptr)

• Introduction

• std::unique_ptr

• std::shared_ptr

• std::weak_ptr

• Smart Pointers: Closing Words

Rule Of Five (Three, Zero), And Move Semantics

Another good thing to have is a rule to fight against C++’s shortcomings. This expains how to write copyable and movable types, likewise.

• The Rule Of Three/Five/Zero

• Move Semantics, Rvalue References

• Perfect Forwarding, only to show that this is a different concept but looks syntactically much like moving.

Multithreading, Memory Model

This section is a bit involved as all of this is somehow related.

• From Multithreading, C++ Memory Model

  • The C++ Memory Model. This briefly shows what a race condition is, and gives mutex examples.

• Atomic Shared Pointer (std::atomic<std::shared_ptr<>).

News From The Language

• From Brace Initialization (Uniform Initialization)

  • Brace Initialization: Introduction

  • std::initializer_list: Brace Initialization, Implementor’s View

  • Brace Initialization: A Mess

• Local Variables In Control Flow Statements

• Duck Typing (Err, auto) Without A Duck

• Tuple Unpacking (Err, Structured Binding)

• Explicit Object Member Functions (A.k.a Deducing this)

• The Spaceship Operator <=> (And Comparison In General)

• From Concepts

  • Concepts: Overview

  • Writing Your Own Concepts

News From The Library

• Ranges And Views

• Formatting Library (std::format(), std::print())

• std::filesystem. In addition to basic functionality, show how to handle UTF-8 encoded paths (std::filesystem::u8path) [1]

• From std::any, std::variant, std::optional

  • A Better void*: std::any

  • New-Style Union: std::variant

• Container and algorithms overview (here). Show hash-table based data structures std::unordered_set<> and std::unordered_map<> [1].

• std::array

• Execution Policies And Parallel Algorithms (Incomplete Draft)

• std::span

• std::tuple<> [1]

C++ Executed At Compile Time (The constexpr Engine)

From The constexpr Engine

• const, And What Compilers Can Do With It

• constexpr: Run C++ Code At Compile Time

• consteval: Run C++ Code At Compile Time Only

• constinit And The Static Initialization Order Fiasco

• if constexpr: Metaprogramming Made Easy

Footnotes

[1] (1,2,3)

Material to be created.