Solkar
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Prof. Bjarne Stoustrup of course knows where his towel is when it comes to C++11.
The Matrix example he provided at the 2012 GoingNative Con [Str12] is indeed an appetizer if one has ever dealt with pushing large float arrays around, and I find it remarkable that C++11's share for numerical has not yet rocketed, because that gives way to very expressive style of coding.
The other big fish of C++11 for numerics is "Lambda"-Expressions; that makes it e.g. possible to Integrate over a given Riemann-partition in a single line of code.
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But nowadays, even the best language concepts do pay little if there are no seamless means to push the data into a component of a distributed system.
Consider a number-crunching application core that is stateful and idle while waiting for data that is to be processed depending to the state; e.g. an application that has found certain physically valid morph paths and is now waiting for arbitrary surface data to actually be morphed that way.
MPI is fine when data arrives sooner-or-later, but what if the arrival of data is depending on user interaction; e.g. because it does not arrive at all be cause the object's update is dropped during culling?
SOAP would be fine if would not bring a large overhead with it that required a parsing which is often more time-expensive than (vectorized) processing of the workload.
So CORBA, which is often said to be plainly "dead", still appears the best platform-independent fast solution for this scenario (COM/DCOM is also fast, but MS specific)
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So CORBA it is - but wait!
[OMG12] is not exactly what one would call C++11-ish - there are pointers passed around in never-come-back fashion which makes it a QA nightmare. And even "STL" appears sort-of terra incognita for that standard.
--
So OMG has recently released [OMG13], a C++11 IDL-binding.
Fortunately so.
Fortunately?
Well - what appears missing even on a first look is delegation-based binding (aka "tie"-implementation) of [OMG12] That is quite strange; especially in the light of improved generics of C++11 - one intuitively would likely expect "more generics" in a C++11 binding than in prior C++-bindings, but definitely not "less generics".
By glueing together the lifetime of the implementation and the servant by "allowing" inheritance-only, OMG sort-of implies a very bad programming model for concurrent apps - custom "p_impl"ing and per-case custom life-cycle management to protect expensive assets from being d'tored just because the servant runs out of like-keeping refs.
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I'm yet not sure how to deal with that in a consistent fashion; at least it appears there is a sort of (template-based) "life-cycle layer best practices" needed in supplement to the OMG standard.
Opinions or advice on that? Solkar
[Str12] Stroustrup, Bjarne C++11 Style – A Touch of Class. GoingNative Conference, 2012. http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/GoingNative/GoingNative-2012/Keynote-Bjarne-Stroustrup-Cpp11-Style?format=flash (Slides available there)
[OMG12] OMG C++ language Mapping. OMG, 2012. http://www.omg.org/spec/CPP/1.3
[OMG13] OMG C++11 language Mapping. OMG, 2013. http://www.omg.org/spec/CPP11/
The Matrix example he provided at the 2012 GoingNative Con [Str12] is indeed an appetizer if one has ever dealt with pushing large float arrays around, and I find it remarkable that C++11's share for numerical has not yet rocketed, because that gives way to very expressive style of coding.
The other big fish of C++11 for numerics is "Lambda"-Expressions; that makes it e.g. possible to Integrate over a given Riemann-partition in a single line of code.
---
But nowadays, even the best language concepts do pay little if there are no seamless means to push the data into a component of a distributed system.
Consider a number-crunching application core that is stateful and idle while waiting for data that is to be processed depending to the state; e.g. an application that has found certain physically valid morph paths and is now waiting for arbitrary surface data to actually be morphed that way.
MPI is fine when data arrives sooner-or-later, but what if the arrival of data is depending on user interaction; e.g. because it does not arrive at all be cause the object's update is dropped during culling?
SOAP would be fine if would not bring a large overhead with it that required a parsing which is often more time-expensive than (vectorized) processing of the workload.
So CORBA, which is often said to be plainly "dead", still appears the best platform-independent fast solution for this scenario (COM/DCOM is also fast, but MS specific)
---
So CORBA it is - but wait!
[OMG12] is not exactly what one would call C++11-ish - there are pointers passed around in never-come-back fashion which makes it a QA nightmare. And even "STL" appears sort-of terra incognita for that standard.
--
So OMG has recently released [OMG13], a C++11 IDL-binding.
Fortunately so.
Fortunately?
Well - what appears missing even on a first look is delegation-based binding (aka "tie"-implementation) of [OMG12] That is quite strange; especially in the light of improved generics of C++11 - one intuitively would likely expect "more generics" in a C++11 binding than in prior C++-bindings, but definitely not "less generics".
By glueing together the lifetime of the implementation and the servant by "allowing" inheritance-only, OMG sort-of implies a very bad programming model for concurrent apps - custom "p_impl"ing and per-case custom life-cycle management to protect expensive assets from being d'tored just because the servant runs out of like-keeping refs.
---
I'm yet not sure how to deal with that in a consistent fashion; at least it appears there is a sort of (template-based) "life-cycle layer best practices" needed in supplement to the OMG standard.
Opinions or advice on that? Solkar
[Str12] Stroustrup, Bjarne C++11 Style – A Touch of Class. GoingNative Conference, 2012. http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/GoingNative/GoingNative-2012/Keynote-Bjarne-Stroustrup-Cpp11-Style?format=flash (Slides available there)
[OMG12] OMG C++ language Mapping. OMG, 2012. http://www.omg.org/spec/CPP/1.3
[OMG13] OMG C++11 language Mapping. OMG, 2013. http://www.omg.org/spec/CPP11/
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