C++ Truths

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...

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...

This is part 4 in the series of Fun with Lambdas: C++14 Style . The previous posts are part 3 , part 2 , and part 1 . C++14 has a number of features that support functional-style design. By "functional-style" I mean heavy use of higher-order functions (functions that take other functions as arguments). Quite often arguments to the higher-order functions are lambdas (closures, to be precise). With automatic return type deduction for normal functions, writing higher-order function becomes very easy and seamless in C++14. This time, I have chosen a "text-book" example to show you the power of C++14: Composable Data Generators What is a Generator? A Generator<T> produces values of type T randomly. There is already a random number generator defined in the C library: random() . It produces long ints. We can use this basic generator to create higher-level generators, such as bool, character, floating point numbers, etc. Even random sequence and structure g...