Vorbrodt's C++ Blog

When I first set out to make a post about database access from C++ I was going to write about MySQL Connector/C++. But for some reason that didn’t sit well with me. After sleeping on it I realized it didn’t appeal to me because it was 1) limited to only one database backend and 2) […]

Measuring how long your program ran for is easy with std::chrono , but what if you need details about user and system space time? Easy! Use Boost CPU Timer library 🙂 It’s another simple library from Boost with only few classes: auto_cpu_timer is like a RAII object; it starts the clock in its constructor, stops […]

This one will be short 🙂 If you want to add more diagnostic information to your programs make sure to check out Boost.Stacktrace library. With it you can capture and print current stack traces. It’s especially useful when combined with exception handling; it allows you to know right away where the exception originated from. #include […]

I like simple and well written C++ libraries, and I’m especially fond of Boost, so I’m going to blog about it some more 🙂 Today I’ll show you how to generate unique IDs using Boost::UUID header only library. There really isn’t much to be said about it other than it’s simple, consists of only few […]

Just when I thought I covered the topic of RPC in C++ with Thrift, I came across a new and very promising RPC framework: Google’s gRPC. The more I read about it the more I like it: just like Thrift it supports many programing languages and internally uses Protocol Buffers to encode messages. So I […]

Protocol Buffers are not always an option and you just have to serialize your data to XML. Then what? Luckily there is a serialization library available from Boost and it makes that pretty easy for us. You don’t even have to modify your existing data structures to write them out as XML: the library is […]

Just like my previous Protocol Buffers post, this one is also meant as a brief introduction that will point you in the right direction rather than an exhaustive tutorial. Here we go… Again we are in search of a portable library, this time not for serialization, but for a portable RPC mechanism. On Windows we […]

This post is meant as a brief introduction that will point you in the right direction rather than an exhaustive tutorial. Here we go… Have you ever had to write code that serialized structured data into an efficient binary format, to be later saved to disk or sent over the network? Do you remember how […]

No, not blogging, that’s still fun 🙂 moving my website to bluehost over the last 24 hours! But it’s finally done and the Vorbrodt’s C++ Blog is smooth sailing once again… on a brand spanking new domain! But have no fear, the old one will kindly redirect. So what have I learned through this exercise? […]

C++17 standard introduced execution policies to the standard algorithms; those allow for parallel and SIMD optimizations. I wanted to see how much faster the Parallel STL can be on my quad core system but

Below is my implementation of the thread pool described in this talk and a benchmark comparing it against my simple thread pool implementation. The advanced pool is 15x faster at scheduling

by Sean Parent

It bothered me that my previous simple timer implementation fired off a new thread for each timeout and interval. I knew things could be done better, but didn’t yet know how. Well this morning inspiration came and I implemented new and shiny

Examples based on this talk.

Below is the old and rusty way of generating random numbers. Don’t do it!

Hilarious and informative talk on C and C++ random number generation:

The following code is a race condition:

The following program, despite looking correct, is a race condition and has unpredictable behaviour:

In the previous post I described Dekker’s algorithm. Its limitation is that it only works for 2 threads. I wanted it to work for N threads, but I can’t atomically check N-1 flags belonging to other threads 🙁 now what?

Dekker’s algorithm is a way of synchronizing two threads around a critical section. It is a dance where thread 1 sets its flag declaring its intent to enter the critical section, then it checks the flag of thread 2.

Long but worth watching. This will take your C++ to the next level 😉