CppCast - Pacific++ Road Show

Episode Date: November 2, 2017

Rob and Jason discuss recent news and the first ever Pacific++ conference in New Zealand. News Next Pacific++ Location Does C++ need a universal package manager Petra: C++17 runtime to compile-time mappings Bjarne Stroustrup Interview at CppCon 2017 C++17 is Here: Interview with Herb Sutter CppCon 2017 Talks CppCon 2017 Lightning Talks Links @robwirving @lefticus Sponsor JetBrains

This episode of CppCast is sponsored by JetBrains, maker of intelligent development tools to simplify your challenging tasks and automate the routine ones. JetBrains is offering a 25% discount for an individual license on the C++ tool of your choice, CLion, ReSharper, C++, or AppCode. Use the coupon code JETBRAINS for CppCast during checkout at jetbrains.com. Episode 125 of CppCast recorded October 29th, 2017. In this episode, we talk about C++ package managers. Then I check in with Jason on his travels in New Zealand. Jason shares some highlights from the developers by C++ developers.

I'm your host Rob Irving, joined by my co-host Jason Turner. Jason, how are you doing today? Pretty good. It's a bit early for me at the moment. Yeah, you want to tell listeners where you are right now? I am currently in New Zealand since we had just wrapped up Pacific++ a couple days ago. Awesome. And you are going to be soon leaving for Germany, right? Yes, next on my way to meeting C++, and I'll be giving two talks there,

which is kind of interesting, actually, because the airline that I'm using to get into and out of Berlin is Air Berlin, which ceased operations fully two days ago. Wow. So three days before your flight or two days before your flight, you were told that your airline is no longer in existence? Well, it's not quite that bad. I still have a few days before i get to berlin but um yes effectively so i had to uh quickly rebook new flights um leaving berlin and i'm still sorting out how i'm actually getting to berlin oh wow and they're non-refundable because they were purchased before the

insolvency period began due to something about German law. Oh, you can't get a refund from Arab Berlin? That's what their website's telling me and what their email's telling me. Wow, that is horrible. That doesn't seem legal for them to not be able to refund you. That's crazy. It's a bankruptcy proceedings. You know, their assets are held in some sort of thing until things get resolved and whatever i can file a claim to someday get refunded if there happens to be enough money left over after the bankruptcy

proceedings are done geez well good luck with that and good luck getting into germany for meeting c++ it shouldn't be that hard there are many many flights into germany i just have to figure out a couple of steps still. Okay, well, I think we're going to talk a little bit more about how the Pacific++ conference went and do our normal news. We don't have a guest this week, but I think it should be a good plan, right Jason? Yeah, you know, our listeners seem to like it when we just do news only episodes sometimes, so let's give it a shot.

Okay, well, before we get to that, at the top of our episode, I'd like to read a piece of feedback. And this one, we got a really long email, but I really appreciate these emails. This one comes from Lori Hedge. And she wrote in, I finally finished catching up with all the back episodes of the podcast. And I just want to say thanks for putting together such an excellent resource for C++ programmers. With the pace of change picking up in the world of C++, it really is invaluable to have something like your podcast to help keep the busy programmer up to speed with what's going on in the wider community. You always ask for guest suggestions, and as I've been listening, there are a few that

spring to mind that I don't think you've had yet. I don't know of these people personally so I'm afraid I can't put you in touch but they are people I follow and find interesting and I'd love to hear more from them on the podcast and and Laurie sent us a whole bunch of different guest suggestions um some of these I'm familiar with like John Cormack from Oculus, Stephanie Holbert of Binomial but there's a whole bunch that I'm not familiar with either. PJ Ploger, who's one of the library implementers for Dinkumware, who would certainly be an interesting guest. Abner Kombra of NASA, Tim Sweeney, Epic Games, Lee Bamber or Paul Johnson of TGC, which is the Game Creators. I definitely don't know them.

I do know who Tim Sweeney is. I follow him on Twitter, I believe. Yeah. Well, a whole bunch of really good guest suggestions, and I'm certainly going to try to reach out to some of these and hopefully we can get them onto the schedule and talk to some of them. So, you know, we try, we tried to get Carmack on,

right? I think we did. Um, and I think at the time that we reached out to him or, or through his PR, it was like right around, uh, the big games conference.

Three or something. Yeah. Three. Although I, we are going to have someone else from Oculus on the show soon. Not John Cormac, but someone else. Whose name I can't remember right now,

but I believe it's someone who works on the Oculus SDK. Should be good. Yeah, should be interesting. You know, on the topic of this listener having gone through and just caught up on all the back episodes, it makes me wonder when she found out about the show like last week and then listened to 125 episodes in like a day yeah that's a good question i do wonder how you know listeners kind of stumble

upon the podcast and then decide to listen to the back catalog i'm curious uh what we could do to find more listeners like that who want to listen to all the older episodes and get caught up to speed well maybe we should do at some point you know like a long time listener first time caller kind of episode two or something yeah that'd be fun i did uh recently have someone ask me like well you know they were just overwhelmed with how many episodes we have and they're wondering what episode they should start with yeah and i just i don't i mean i ended up suggesting jonathan mueller's episode just because it has a surprise ending so uh but yeah i don't know what do you mean by a surprise ending with that one well isn't that the one where

we you know learned something surprising about him yes yes okay at the end of the episode yeah that he was still in high school at the time oh see now you just gave it away for listeners who haven't heard that episode yet my apologies i don't remember that being at the end of the episode i thought that was kind of around his bio that we realized that. Oh, Oh, yeah. To be fair,

I haven't gone back and listened to it myself. Well, neither have I. Okay. Well, we'd love to hear your thoughts about the show as well. Uh, you can always reach out to us on Facebook,

Twitter, or email us at feedback at cbcast.com. And don't forget to leave us a review on iTunes. Um, so the speaking of pacific plus plus i saw that on twitter since they did just wrap up the conference they were looking for uh suggestions on when where the next pacific plus plus conference should be held and the ideas are either christ churchurch, Auckland, or Sydney. And there's a tweet where you can go vote your opinion on this. And where was it held this year, Jason?

It was held in Christchurch. Okay, and what is Christchurch like? I mean, would you rather be at a place like Sydney? I've never been to Sydney. Right. And I've never been to Auckland. Of the three at this point, I've only ever been to Christchurch. And it is a pleasant small city.

It has everything you need, and an airport that is international. And it seemed like a decent number of people who came came partially because they're from Christchurch or from smaller cities, and it was easy for them to access.

So I'd be afraid that if it moved to Sydney, maybe they wouldn't get the same group of people, I guess I should say. I don't really know, of course. I mean, there might be a larger group of people in Sydney who would be able to attend then, though. Yeah, that's almost certainly true. It's a much bigger city. And there was a fair number of people actually from Sydney, from Wargaming, who was one of the sponsors of the conference, who came to Christchurch.

Okay. But from what I've learned around here, and I'm still not entirely sure, but it seems that all of these cities have easy hops between them. Like you can get a direct hop from Christchurch to Sydney or whatever for not terribly expensive. Because, I don't know, it just seems like there's inexpensive airlines easy to hop around between these areas. Right, right. Do you think you might be going again next year, though, Jason? Well, I mean, if I have the opportunity to. Right.

May as well. Okay, next article. And this kind of ties into what we were talking about with the last episode with Izzy. Does C++ need a universal package manager? And this is an article on Paul Foltz's blog, who was one of the first guests we ever had on the show. And he's talking. Yeah, a long time ago.

And he's talking about the different package managers and how maybe, you know, we might not ever get a single universal package manager that the entire community uses, but maybe we could try to standardize some parts of what it means to be a package manager, like a common configuration file that a library could expose that different package managers would be set up to ingest, which definitely sounds like a good idea. I don't know what it would take to have

all the different disparate package managers go and and make these changes to support it yeah i don't know i was reading the article kind of thinking that too like it seems like that would be almost as hard as getting everyone on board with a universal package manager yeah but then i didn't realize that paul was author of his own package manager seagat no i was not aware of that one either and actually there's a whole bunch on here that i have maybe heard of but i don't know much about i mean obviously there's there's conan who we had on the show and that kind of derived from b code had a bunch of the same people working on it. But then there's also Buckaroo, Seagate, which I think was Paul Foltz's,

Conda, CPM, CPP-AN, and Hunter. And I don't have much familiarity with most of those. No, the only other two that I've heard of, Buckaroo, because someone from that project, I believe recently submitted a patch to ChaiScript. Is that the Facebook one? I don't even know. I just accepted the patch.

Okay. And Hunter, which I think is a direct CMake add-in. So it just uses CMake to do its work. Okay. I think that's right. You know, one thought I had while reading this article was, obviously, it's not the place of the standards committee to be standardizing a certain build system or a certain package manager.

That's definitely out of the scope of what goes on at the ISO committee. I almost wonder if maybe it would make sense to have a working group just to have somewhere associated with the standards body where people could talk about these things and maybe make suggestions like a common package manager definition. So just like in a hypothetical situation, if a large proposed change to the standards like modules were to somehow affect the ability for a package manager to work well that's something that could be discussed in this working group yeah yeah kind of makes sense right i i perhaps i mean i don't i i don't claim to like really understand how the inner workings of the committee work but it does not sound like an unreasonable suggestion. No, it doesn't. Maybe someone else who's a part of the Standards Committee could chime in on this after they listen to the episode and let us know if that's a bad idea or maybe a half-decent idea.

I don't know. I'm quite certain it's a bad idea, and we just don't understand why. That's quite possible. Okay, this next one is Petra and this is a library put together by Jackie Kay who we had on the show a while ago and the library

actually I think she announced a couple months ago but I just noticed her tweeting about it a couple days ago and thought we'd mention it and this is a C++17 metaprogramming library for transforming runtime values to compile time values and types. I was wondering

what your thoughts were on this one, Jason. I just, so I looked at this last night and I thought I need to, actually, this was my train of thought. My train of thought was, hmm, I wonder if Jackie's going to be presenting at this at Meeting C++. Then I can just go watch her talk on it.

So then I looked up the Meeting C++ conference schedule, and sure enough, she is going to be talking about it. Okay. However, it's on the third day of the conference, which I'm no longer able to attend since I had to change my flights. That's unfortunate. Yes. So at that point, I was just sad, and I didn't go back and dig into the actual details of the library, which I probably should have.

But it does make sense. So for our listeners, it builds a compile time table of possible values and then you can do a lookup of a value into the compile time table when you need to or yes right and some of the benefits of that would be you know you could use constexpr functions on an input variable that type of thing oh see that's where it starts to get a little fuzzy for me. But yes, I mean, if you can... So it says, let's clear it. Runtime values to compile time values.

So you still, like, if you have something that's runtime, then it's just runtime. There's no way to assign that to a constexpr thing, right? Right. But if you have a table that you generated at compile time or something, and then you want to ask, I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. I need to spend more time looking at it.

I need to go to Jackie's talk. But at the very least, all those will be up on YouTube at some point. Yeah, Meeting C++ will put all their videos up pretty quickly, just like CppCon does, right? Yes. Oh, and on that topic, Pacific++ already announced that on Monday they expect the videos to be going up. Oh, that's great. Yeah, so, well, I guess Monday, perhaps in New Zealand time,

which will be sunday wait what day is it it's sunday there right now right today is sunday for me yes yeah so weird time traveling kind of thing going on here yeah so it's entirely possible those videos will start going up today i'm checking right now. Pacific Plus Plus is kind of a hard thing to search for, though. Yes. I'm seeing a bunch of videos about Pacific Wars. I don't know. Well, there's nothing I've tweeted about it yet on the official Twitter page.

Although I did just notice that he made me the backdrop for the official the official twitter page which is kind of that's kind of cool no i need to spend more time looking at this library from jackie for sure yeah well and apparently she'll have a talk that we can all watch uh to learn more about it too yes okay uh next one is uh bjarnasne Stroustrup was interviewed at CppCon 2017, and this was an interview from the Going Native channel from Microsoft, so it's up on Channel 9. And they always do a really good job with these interviews. We sat down for one last year. Did you sit down for another one this year, Jason?

I did not. I was pretty busy at the conference, so I didn't sign up for that. Okay. I did not I was pretty busy at the conference so I didn't sign up for that okay well this one is Bjarne and Gabby Dos Reis talking with the interviewer whose name I can't remember oh Steve Carroll and mostly talking about Bjarne's keynote which was really interesting to watch and talking a lot about teaching C++ and what we can all do to help teach C++ and bring it to new programmers. Did you have a chance to watch the video? I didn't given my current internet situation. But for our listeners who weren't aware,

or maybe even CBP con attendees who weren't paying attention, there was an overall theme of teaching C++ at this year's conference. Yeah. Several of the keynotes were around that subject. And I know with Bjarne's, at least, part of it was how to make the introduction experience of C++ easier. And that kind of goes back to what we were talking about with build systems and package managers, that if we did have, you know, universal build system or universal package manager, that would certainly be easier to get someone going if we could just point them to, oh, go use this to get started. Yeah, I mean, it's true. That is like Python and Ruby. It's just like crazy, stupid easy

to start including a bunch of other packages. Yeah, definitely. But then we have that issue that happened with JavaScript, right? I believe we've talked about it on the show before, where some three-line library in NPM

went away, right? Mm-hmm. And it caused the entire world to explode yeah yeah so i think i wonder if there's just this underlying aversion in the c++ community because we're like no we're c++ we control our. We don't want everything to come toppling down like a house of cards because someone's three-line header-only string library decided to go away. Well, I think if you're in a large organization, you maybe don't think about these things as much because your build system and whatever you do for package management

has been running for years and years and you don't really care that much to change anything. And if you're a new developer to that company, you just need to learn how your company does things. But if you're starting fresh or you're an open source developer making a library, then these things are a big concern and they can be hard to deal with.

Yeah, but at the same time, you know, these things are a big concern and they can be hard to deal with. Yeah. But at the same time, it's just undeniable how much of a help and how much easier it makes it to get started than Python and Ruby and Perl and whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Next article is an interview that Herb Sutter did with InfoQ, which is a website I'm not really too familiar with,

but the interview was really good. It was on C++17. The ISO committee has just formally approved the new standard and kind of getting some of Herb's thoughts on it, what some of the big features were in his eyes, and also what some of the major focus areas will be on c++ 20. yeah and it was a really good interview um he apparently did the interview over email so he was able to write really thoughtful and long answers which is nice of course her always

gives really thoughtful long answers to everything i think it's um yeah some interesting little bits in here i think um like asking him if he has any more books planned yeah he had an interesting answer to that how he was writing books back when he was kind of still learning some things himself and now that he's you know kind of guiding the c++ community as the uh as the convener he doesn't really have much to to write about learning c++ he's kind of focused on what he can do within the standards committee to make c++ better yeah yeah and that's i mean i think that's true for most of us who have blogged or created material like you you do you learn something interesting

so therefore you decide to share that with yeah yeah and for listeners who don't or have never written a blog that's you know it really is a powerful resource to be able to to write down something you just learned because you'll learn it you know 10 times better by writing down and maybe getting feedback from it from other people in the community. It's definitely a good thing to do if you've never done it before. Just the thought process of how do I explain this to someone else? And now the topic is three times bigger than you thought it was. Was there anything else really interesting that we wanted to bring up from this

interview with Herb? Well, they do ask him if he gets any inspiration or finds interest in other upcoming languages like Rust, Swift, and Go. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and he had another really good answer for that. I mean, he said, obviously, we do. And he had one interesting point about how Swift is a great example of seeing something change in a language because Swift is more or less replacing Objective-C. And how well Apple is able to do that because they kind of own both platforms completely.

Have you programmed in Objective-C or Swift? I have not programmed in swift i have programmed an objective c it's kind of a nightmare yes i've programmed an objective c briefly and i just despised it i and i think i understand what they were going for back when it was created but i was wondering yeah if you could compare it to swift but since neither one of us can compare it to swift it's not terribly helpful, I guess. I'm going to have to check out Swift at some point. The one thing I know

is Objective-C, the one nice thing about it is how well it interrupts with C++. Although there are definitely some pitfalls you can run into. I'm not sure if Swift does at all. I think Swift will interrupt with Objective-C

so you can kind of use all three if your goal is to use some C++ with your iOS app, but you want to be able to write Swift too. I think you'd wind up using all three, but that's kind of a mess. I had this brief conversation

at Pacific++ with well, there was a meet the speakers dinner, so we kind of got grilled a bit. But it was, I still think even in this day and age, for a language to be really successful, at least for a systems language, a compiled language to be really successful, it has to have some way of interacting with a C ABI. I'm sorry, can you repeat that? For a language to be successful, a compiled language to be successful, it has to have some way of interacting with a C ABI. Yeah. I mean, like Java even has ways of interacting with C, right? Mm-hmm.

So I assume Swift has some way of interacting with C functions, but I could be wrong. Yeah, I'd have to look into that, about what they do for C interrupt if they do anything. I'm still curious about... Especially if they have to do a spell. I'm curious about Kotlin, too, which I know we've talked about before when Kotlin was first announced. I'm not sure if they do

any C or C++ interrupt. Kotlin compiles to the JVM, right? Right. So Kotlin's kind of like a Java replacement the way Swift is an Objective-C replacement. Right. So at least through the, whatever, what's the Java C API

thing? JNI. J and i there you go yeah at least through j and i i would imagine you could with uh with kotlin maybe maybe okay and then the last thing to announce is it looks like all the cpp con 2017 videos are now on YouTube. The playlist for the talks, it looks like it's 126 talks and then I think 55 lightning talks in addition to that. So it's a lot of content to watch.

I am definitely still trying to catch up. I just watched Izzy's talk the other day. And they're all up there. So you got plenty to watch until CBPCon next year. I have so many that I have to watch when I get back to having normal, regular internet access again.

You all are able to at least start going on these things, but it'll be until after meeting C++ for me before I'll really have the time to sit down and watch them. Have you tried, Rob, to watch all of the videos from the conference before?

No, I don't think I've ever tried to watch everything. At least 130 hours of videos or whatever in this one? Yeah, I mean mean that's just a lot of content i mean i'll always make sure i watch like all the keynotes and and then i'll kind of pick and choose but yeah never watched them all yeah that's uh i have met and just i bring this up because i have met a couple of people who for whatever reason haven't been able to attend one of the bigger conferences who had said that they made a point of watching every single video from

a particular year. Like how I, one person said he was sick lying on the sofa and he just watched them all straight. Like I can't imagine. The one thing I would consider is maybe if you try to listen to the videos, the way you would watch a podcast where, you know, you can certain podcast players will let you watch something at like 1.5 or 2x speed. And I think YouTube lets you do it, too. Yeah. But if you want to actually like pay attention to the slides and code snippets, you can't be watching it at double speed. No, I wouldn't think so. at least depending on the speaker yeah i know some speakers uh they have a very good pace of putting something up letting you digest it and then moving on you could probably watch them a little bit faster you

just wouldn't get the digestion time right but some of us sometimes me has you know two or three slides per minute yeah going up and that could be i think harder to follow depending on what you're doing right or you have other talks that i've given where i i gave a hundred and a 90minute talk in 60 minutes, and that one I really don't recommend watching at fast. Yeah, that'd be hard to do. Yeah, that was just a mistake. Yeah. Okay, well, that's all the news articles we got, Jason. Do you want to talk some more about your experience at Pacific Plus Plus?

Sure. It was a great conference. There was 10 speakers, 10 talks, about 66 people, I think, very opening talk of the conference it was a great way to start the conference was um because chandler has good energy when he's speaking um he gave an overview of all of the tools that are in the clang and llvm project that relate to C++. Okay. And I would have thought that what he did was effectively impossible. And it's not even... So I would have thought that giving an overview of these tools in an hour would have been pushing it. But he took it to the next level,

where he checked out and compiled the tools and then gave a live demo overview of using each of them within an hour. Now, I mean, in a sense, he cheated just a little bit because he was using his server back at home, which can compile LLVM and Clang in five minutes. Okay. Most of us don't have access to 32 or 64 cores or whatever it was that he was building on but um but yes he makes it all seem very approachable and it was we're well done

that sounds like a great talk yeah um that one i think everyone should be looking forward to coming up. And aside from you and Chandler, were all the other talks from locals, from the New Zealand, Australian area? I believe every other speaker either is from New Zealand. I think every other speaker is currently living in New Zealand or Australia. Not all of them are natives, right? Sure. Some definition of native, I guess.

But, yes. I was just in general surprised to learn how many Br brits are living in new zealand um but that's relatively easy for them with their uh with their british commonwealth relationship yeah yeah um so there's that and then let's see Yes, I guess that's the answer to that question. Any particular highlights from some of the other speakers? I'm taking a look at the list of the schedule right now. So Dean Barris, whom I had never met before,

also works at Google and has helped develop this project called X-Ray, which is used for debugging projects, doing call tracing and that kind of thing. His talk was entertaining. He was entertaining, and it was a well-done talk. I mean, you know, there was only 10 talks, so they definitely all had something to add. But that was Dean I had never met before.

That was a good talk. And I learned... It was an interesting overview of the differences in how compilers handle different warning levels from Tom Isaacson, which was the very last talk of the conference. Okay. And I guess I'll mention one other one. It's not to say that the others aren't worth mentioning,

but just for the sake of not going through every single one. Sarah Smith gave this talk, Postcards from the Cross-Platform Frontier. And in a way, it was the most daring talk I think I've ever seen someone give. Okay. She live-coded a Twitter feed reader in Qt Creator

and then demoed it running on her Mac, and then plugged in her iPhone and demoed it running on her iPhone. Oh, wow. It was almost that easy. I mean, it was done in an hour. And, you know, you and I have both programmed an Objective-C. Yeah.

Do you think you could have written that in objective c and had it running on your iphone no no it's definitely not something i would want to try the fact that she used qt like was a huge help and she had some of the like twitter back end stuff was oh no no actually, I think she was actually getting it straight from the, uh, straight from the, what do you call it? Uh, restful API from Twitter. Oh, okay. It was, I was, um, to see it running in an hour and to think about how much effort I've gone gone through trying to wrangle Objective-C on the iPhone and trying to wrangle Java on Android and to think that yes, and today in this day and age, I could have just written one app for one platform and then run it on Android and iOS from Qt Creator would be just a huge help for me and be able to

stick with the language I already know. Yeah. I really like the description of her talk because it's something I think about all the time, how we always hear about multi-platform technologies like React, Cordova, and Unity, and those names always seem to be changing, whatever the newest cross-platform JavaScript framework is. But C++ has always been there. It's just not necessarily thought about as much when you talk about writing an iPhone or Android app, doing it in C++. I certainly suggest you consider it next time

you need to do a cross-platform app. I know I will. Yeah. I'll have to watch her talk. It sounds like a fun one. Yeah. Okay. Well, I'll have to watch her talk. It sounds like a fun one. Yeah. Okay. Well, like we said, you're going to be going to Germany next to speak at Meeting C++.

Hopefully, you're able to get all your travel sorted out, Jason. Thanks. Hopefully, yes. Yeah. And do you think we might be able to touch base from Germany too? Well, my stay in Germany is becoming more abbreviated because of the flight issue, but we will see if we can. It is certainly easier to work out Central European time compared to,

I don't even know what this time zone is actually called. New Zealand time, whatever it's called yeah it's new zealand time but i'm sure it's shared with a couple of other countries sure sure but like it must be yeah fiji you know i don't know i'm gonna have to look that up now but yes new zealand time and we are now it's technically, so since this is the beginning of fall, no, this is the beginning of spring, right? They just spring ahead here. So they're off compared to the rest of the world until the rest, well, I mean, until the northern hemisphere,

until the northern hemisphere falls back in a couple of days, I believe, is the time. Actually, was the time change today for you? No, definitely wasn't today. I don't know when it is, but it must be soon. I think Europe just changed today, actually. So it must be next week that the U.S. changes. I don't know. I'd have to look into that, too.

It just keeps everything interesting. It's November 5th, so it's in six days for us. Okay. Right around the time this episode's going to's in six days for us. Okay. Right around the time this episode is going to air actually. Very good. Yeah. Okay. Well,

it's been great talking to you, Jason. I'm glad we were able to do this. Um, and hopefully we'll be able to work something out while you're in Germany. Okay. All right. Thanks Rob.

And thanks for keeping the show going while I'm on the road. Yeah, absolutely. And thank you to everyone for listening. Thanks so much for listening in as we chat about C++. I'd love to hear what you think of the podcast. Please let me know if we're discussing the stuff you're interested in. Or if you have a suggestion for a topic, I'd love to hear about that too.

You can email all your thoughts to feedback at cppcast.com. I'd also appreciate if you like CppCast on Facebook and follow CppCast on Twitter. You can also follow me at Rob W. Irving and Jason at Leftkiss on Twitter. And of course, you can find all that info and the show notes on the podcast website at cppcast.com. Theme music for this episode is provided by podcastthemes.com.