I was lucky to get a place at this month’s C++ London meet up, having a limited number of seats and being hosted by Smarkets at their offices in St Katherine’s Dock. Smarkets are an online betting exchange – and they’re currently hiring!
This evening was started by Alex Schmolck, presenting his work configuring the development and build systems for Smarkets. He’s experimented with Vagrant and Docker, but is now an advocate of Nix. He admits that Docker is initially more productive, but Nix has the edge for its efficiency and speed.
The main talk (see slides) was given by Mateusz Pusz, showing a series of examples to demonstrating how a body of code can evolve and improve significantly with the features introduced by C++11, C++14, C++17 and soon C++20.
For example, implementing functions with variable numbers of parameters – such as for populating a container of items for a testing library. With C++98, this might have led to many overloads with increasing numbers of arguments (but only ever handling up to some hand-coded limit). With C++11 onwards, you could use variadic templates, handling any number of parameters. And with C++17 onwards, you could use fold expressions to simplify the code further (no need to the ‘base class’ template overload).
Another interesting example was the evolution of Compile-Time Dispatch. Whereas even C++ 11requires hand-rolling overloads on a hierarchy of tag classes, post C++17, you can use constexpr to organise the code within a single method.
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