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Showing posts from November, 2015

Covariance and Contravariance in C++ Standard Library

Covariance and Contravariance are concepts that come up often as you go deeper into generic programming. While designing a language that supports parametric polymorphism (e.g., templates in C++, generics in Java, C#), the language designer has a choice between Invariance, Covariance, and Contravariance when dealing with generic types. C++'s choice is "invariance". Let's look at an example. struct Vehicle {}; struct Car : Vehicle {}; std::vector<Vehicle *> vehicles; std::vector<Car *> cars; vehicles = cars; // Does not compile The above program does not compile because C++ templates are invariant. Of course, each time a C++ template is instantiated, the compiler creates a brand new type that uniquely represents that instantiation. Any other type to the same template creates another unique type that has nothing to do with the earlier one. Any two unrelated user-defined types in C++ can't be assigned to each-other by default. You have to provide a

CppCon'15 and Silicon Valley Code Camp Presentations

In last couple of months I did a couple of presentations about my recent projects in C++. Session videos, slides, and code for all the presentations are now available online. Both projects have functional programming at their heart. I've found exploring functional programming in modern C++ quite a fun ride. Without further ado, here's the content CppCon'15: Reactive Stream Processing in Industrial IoT using DDS and RxCpp Topic: 50 billion devices will be connected to the Internet by 2020. Many of them will belong to national critical infrastructure (smart power grids, smart roads, smart hospitals, smart cities) – forming the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). These devices will generate data streams that will need to be correlated, merged, filtered, and analyzed in real-time at the edge. This talk will explore an elegant solution to this problem that is productive, composable, concurrency-friendly, and scales well. We utilize OMG’s Data Distribution Service f