Going Deep (HD) - Channel 9

Here is the Ask Us Anything panel from C++ and Beyond 2012. Andrei Alexandrescu, Scott Meyers and Herb Sutter take questions from attendees. As expected, great questions and answers! Tune in! Table of contents (click the time codes ([xx:xx]) to hear the answers...): Message passing primitives in future versions of the standard... [00:00]Standardized unit testing framework... [02:55]std::async... [04:30]Standard modules proposal... [08:14]Keyword additions and the standard library... [09:35]Problems (and solutions) with exceptions... [12:50]Future of concepts... [22:34]std::thread and thread interruption... [23:03]When to use the auto keyword (and when not to...)... [25:03]More on auto (benefits of reduncancy, type conversion issues with bool to int?)... [29:31]const and multithreaded programming, in C++11 const means thread safe, too... [35:00]Yet more on auto (impact on rampant use and code readability/comprehension)... [42:42]Compiler type deduction information (compiler switch that prints out auto deduced type information)... [50:18]Printing out code for review that replaces auto with the actual type... [53:30]auto and dynamic memory allocation... [54:59]Useful, broadly-used concurrency libraries... [57:00]

Channel 9 was invited to this year's C++ and Beyond to film some sessions (that will appear on C9 over the coming months!) and have a chat with the "Big Three": Andrei Alexandrescu, Scott Meyers, and Herb Sutter. If you are a C++ programmer, then you know these names very well. If you've not heard of C++ and Beyond, well, put it down as a must-attend event (let's hope they do it again in 2013!). You can see material from last year's event here.At the end of day 2, Andrei, Herb and Scott graciously agreed to spend some time discussing various modern C++ topics and, even better, answering questions from the community. In fact, the questions from Niners (and a conversation on reddit/r/cpp) drove the conversation. Huge thanks to Andrei, Herb, and Scott for their time and wisdom. Thanks, too, to the Niners who asked great questions!Here's what happened: [00:00] Themes for C++ in 2012 and beyond (and C++ and Beyond 2012)[07:00] C++11 Efficiency and Concurrency/Parallelism (Standardization)[12:12] dot_tom asks: When can we expect standardized modern libraries like, XML, File system, Web Services?[15:00] ZippyV asks: Standardized modern libraries: What has the response been? Any unexpected requests?[17:17] static if[26:26] Matt_PD asks: Future of template metaprogramming? Standardizing static loops?[40:07] More on template metaprogramming (and static if and enable_if)...[50:05] async/await language feature in C++ would be nice, C&B 2013?

Rx 2.0 is RTW! Get it here. I caught up with Bart at his whiteboard (of course) to discuss the significance of this release as well address some of the great additions to Rx as outlined below (many of the topics below have been discussed in depth in other Rx interviews with Bart.) We also talk about the new experimental build shipping model. Much of the time is spent talking about the portable libraries architecture for Rx for Windows 8, .NET 4.5, WP7/7.5 and beyond. Bart has been very, very busy and as usual his engineering is golden.Tune in! It's always a pleasure to geek out with Bart. So much to learn. Congratulations to the Rx team!!! The highlights of Rx 2.0 include: Support for building Windows Store apps for Windows 8. This includes primitives to synchronize with the Windows XAML CoreDispatcher and interop with WinRT events and IAsync* objects. Support for Portable Class Library projects, allowing code reuse across ".NET Framework 4.5" and ".NET Framework 4.5 for Windows Store apps" projects. We're planning on adding Windows Phone 8 support to this going forward. Integration with the new C# 5.0 and VB 11 "async" and "await" features. In Rx v2.0, you can await an observable sequence, allowing one to apply the power of Rx to the new asynchronous programming model. Enormous performance improvements, with a 4x speedup of the query pipeline, vastly reduced object allocation rates, massively increased throughput of schedulers, and much more. An improved error handling strategy, enabling higher resiliency and proper resource cleanup for queries in the face of user errors at various levels. Thorough revisit of the way we deal with time, to improve efficiency and predictability. This includes better support for periodic timers, improvements to absolute time scheduling, etc. Various new and improved query operators.

Bart De Smet is back and he's going to go deep into improvements made to Rx 2.0 RC (so, Rx 2.0 getting close to coming out of the oven!). As you'd expect, Bart and company have been very busy since Rx 2.0 Beta - lots of performance and reliability improvements and some heavy work in how Rx manages time, new error handling capabilities and event subscription improvements for Rx running on WinRT. Most of the time is spent at the whiteboard - very comfortable and natural place for Bart! Note: there is a lot of time in this interview, both in terms of interview length and the notion of time itself. Use at your own risk and watch out for unexpected wormholes. More on Rx 2.0 RC: This new release of Rx includes a number of improvements to the way we deal with time. As you likely know, dealing with time is a complex undertaking in general, especially when computers are involved. Rx has a lot of temporal query operators to perform event processing, and therefore it needs to be able to schedule work to happen at particular times. As a result, notions of time exist in virtually any layer of the system: from the schedulers at the bottom (in System.Reactive.Core) to the query operators at the top (in System.Reactive.Linq). [Bart De Smet] Download page: https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=255295 Bart's epic blog post: https://blogs.msdn.com/b/rxteam/archive/2012/06/17/reactive-extensions-v2-0-release-candidate-available-now.aspx

At Lang.NEXT 2012, several conversations happened in the "social room", which was right next to the room where sessions took place. Our dear friend, Erik Meijer, led many interesting conversations, some of which we are fortunate enough to have caught on camera for C9. We'll begin with these Expert to Expert episodes with a "standing" conversation (participants stand comfortably close to the whiteboard) with computer scientists Carl Hewitt, Visiting Professor at Stanford University, creator of the Planner programming language, inventor of the Actor Model (the topic of this conversation), Clemens Szyperski, an MSR scientist working in the Connected Systems Group and Erik. What are actors, exactly? No, really. What are they? When is an actor an actor? Everything you wanted to know about actors, but we're afraid to ask... It's all right here. Big thanks to Carl, Clemens and Erik. This is an excellent E2E(2E)!

Rx v2.0 Beta is here! Who better to tell us all about it - and in great detail at the whiteboard - than Bart J. F. De Smet. This is a long interview, so take your time. Watch it in parts or at one sitting. There was no easy way to dice this up into separate videos, so we give it to you as it happened - in one take. As usual, Bart's explanations are thorough and clear. Enjoy. Learn. Rx has a come a long way and there's a great deal of new, improved reactive goodness in 2.0! Congratulations to Bart and team. Highlights of this release: Support for .NET 4.5 Beta. Support for .NET for Metro style applications and Windows 8 Consumer Preview.Rx Portable Library Beta. Await support on IObservable. Async variants of various operators. Scheduling using async methods. Generalized time-based operators. Improved performance. You can read much more about this release in Bart's (lengthy) blog post, including download links and installation instructions.