CppQuiz.org is an open source C++ quiz site ran by me, with contributions from the C++ community. If you’re unfamiliar with it, you can read more in its “About” section.

Thanks to great help from Nicolas Lesser and Simon Brand, all the questions and explanations on CppQuiz.org have now been updated from C++11 to C++17. This task would have taken me a very long time to do on my own, but thanks to Nicolas and Simon, this was all done in no more than four days!

If you want to test your knowledge of C++, try out the quiz now!

If you enjoyed this post, you can subscribe to my blog, or follow me on Twitter.

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CppQuiz.org is an open source C++ quiz site ran by me, with contributions from the C++ community. If you’re unfamiliar with it, you can read more in its “About” section

All the CppQuiz questions are currently targetting C++11. We need to update them for C++17. Most questions will still have the same answers, we just need to update the explanations and references to the standard. A few questions will also have different answers.

Doing this all by myself is going to take months, so I would very much appreciate some help from the community. Everyone who helps will be credited in a blog post when the porting is done.

To make porting as simple as possible, I’ve created a repository containing all the questions. There is a directory for each question, named after the question number. That directory contains the source code of the question in a .cpp file, the hint and explanation in .md files, as well as a README.md explaining everything you need to do to port the question. There’s also an issue for each question, making it easier to track progress. The issue has the same information as the README.md file.

As soon as we’ve updated all the questions in this repository, I’ll import them back into CppQuiz, and from then on CppQuiz will always ask about C++17.

How to help porting questions

There are two ways to contribute, listed below. I prefer the first alternative, but if that prevents you from contributing, the second is also ok.

Contributing using a fork and pull requests

1. Fork the repo by clicking the “Fork” button at the top right.
2. Pick the issue for a question you want to port. Add a comment that you’ll be handling that issue.
3. Follow the instructions in the issue to port the question.
4. Make a pull request. Porting several questions in one PR is fine.

Contributing without a fork

If you think forking and PRs is too cumbersome, or you are not able to do this for other reasons, I’d still appreciate your help:

1. Pick the issue for a question you want to port. Add a comment that you’ll be handling that issue.
2. Follow the instructions in the issue to port the question.
3. Paste the updated files as comments to the issue.

Other ways to help

• Look for questions labeled “help wanted”. It means the person responsible needs a second pair of eyes.
• Look at pull requests, review them and comment “LGTM” if they should be merged.
• Other ideas for help are also welcome, please get in touch (see “Questions” below).

Questions

If you have any questions, either file an issue in the repo, contact @knatten on Twitter, or email me at anders@knatten.org.

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I know it’s not Friday, but I couldn’t wait to share this: Yesterday I signed the contract for my new job as senior developer at Zivid Labs!

While looking for a new position this time, I talked to a lot of cool companies. Zivid stuck out as the most interesting, and I’m very happy to have been accepted into their team!

Zivid have made the world’s most accurate real-time 3D color camera. In other words, the world’s coolest eyes for robots 😎. The main API is in modern, clean C++, with bindings to other languages as well. My main role will be working on the C++ parts of the API, as well as other C++ systems and frameworks. This is actually my first C++ job for over five years, so you can expect me to increase activity both on this blog and on C++ conferences, both of which I really look forward to!

Why did I choose Zivid?

• They make a really cool product!
• They have very high ambitions for the developer experience of their users (this is important to me, as it sets a very high bar for code quality, API quality, docs quality etc.)
• Even though they’re a “hardware company”, they treat software as a first class citizen, and an equally important success factor as the hardware itself
• I met some great people during my interviews there, all of which I really wanted to work with
• They have very experienced owners, like SINTEF and Geir Førre (Chipcon, Energy Micro)
• They recently started shipping their first product, and the first customers seem to be very impressed

Now it’s time to finish paternity leave, have a few weeks of much needed vacation, then I’ll join the team on 1 October. I’m really looking forward to joining an awesome team making an awesome product!

Update: This article is more than a year old. Recent versions of macOS ship with much better C++17 support out of the box, so you should check whether your default Clang already supports your use case before bothering with this approach.

C++17 brings a lot of cool new features. Viva64 have a nice overview. Sadly, they can’t all be used out of the box on macOS, as the default toolchain isn’t very modern.

The problem

Apple installs their own version of llvm along with Xcode. This custom llvm also uses custom version numbers, so it isn’t always easy to know which version of mainline llvm it is based on. For instance on my macOS High Sierra, I get:

$ clang --version
Apple LLVM version 9.0.0 (clang-900.0.39.2)

This version number has nothing to with the official llvm version, which is currently at 6.0.0. All I know is that it is behind.

The solution(s)

If you want to try out some new features today, you have a few options:

• Use std::experimental to play with certain features
• Install a more modern llvm

Using std::experimental

Sometimes, the C++ standards committee publishes experimental C++ language and library extensions for future standardization. These go in the std::experimental namespace. If you just want to play with some new features, your toolchain might already include what you’re looking for here. However, be aware that these features as they exist in the experimental namespace are not guaranteed to be identical to how they end/ended up in the actual C++ standard! So this should just be used for toying around, not  for production code.

As an example, I wanted to try out the new optional feature. This was included in a technical specification, and has been available as std::experimental::optional for a while. Note however that its interface changed before being merged to the official standard as std::optional. The former for instance lacks the has_value member function.

Installing a more modern llvm

This is the proper solution. It’s not too hard either! First, you probably don’t want to risk breaking your current Xcode setup by installing a mainline llvm interfering with the Apple llvm used by Xcode. Luckily, homebrew avoids this problem by default, by installing llvm in another location than the Apple llvm, and not adding the new one to path.

Embedded Artistry has a good guide for this. In short, all you need to do is

$ brew install --with-toolchain llvm

This will take quite some time, and you’ll end up with mainline llvm (currently version 6.0.0) in a path you can find by running:

$ brew --prefix llvm

On my machine, I get:

/usr/local/opt/llvm

I’m not going to copy paste their entire guide, so I suggest you read through it for the details of how to configure your project to use the newly installed mainline llvm instead of the apple llvm you have in path.

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Did you use to have some sort of intuition for what “lvalue” and “rvalue” meant? Are you confused about glvalues, xvalues and prvalues, and worry that lvalues and rvalues might also have changed? This post aims to give you a basic intuition for all five of them.

First, a warning: This post does not aim to give a complete definition of the five value categories. Instead, I only hope to give a basic intuition, which I hope will help to have in the back of your mind next time you need to look up the actual details of one of them. Feel free to flame me in the comment section, but I don’t promise I’ll bite! :)

Back before C++11, there were two value categories, lvalue and rvalue. The basic intuition was that lvalues were things with identities, such as variables, and rvalues were temporaries:

However, along came rvalue references and move semantics. On the surface, the old lvalue / rvalue distinction seems sufficient: Never move from lvalues (people might still be using them), feel free to move from rvalues (they’re just temporary anyway):

Why did I put “Can’t move” and “lvalue” in red in that diagram? It turns out that you might want to move from certain lvalues! For instance, if you have an lvalue you won’t be using anymore, you can std::move() it to cast it to an rvalue reference. A function can also return an rvalue reference to an object with identity.

So as it turns out, whether something has identity, and whether something can be moved from, are orthogonal properties! We’ll solve the problem of moving from lvalues soon, but first, let’s just change our diagram to reflect our new orthogonal view of the world:

Clearly, there’s a name missing in the lower left corner here. (We can ignore the top right corner, temporaries which can’t be moved from is not a useful concept.)

C++11 introduces a new value category “xvalue”, for lvalues which can be moved from. It might help to think of “xvalue” as “eXpiring lvalue”, since they’re probably about to end their lifetime and be moved from (for instance a function returning an rvalue reference).

In addition, what was formerly called “rvalue” was renamed to “prvalue”, meaning “pure rvalue”. These are the three basic value categories:

But we’re not quite there yet, what’s a “glvalue”, and what does “rvalue” mean these days? It turns out that we’ve already explained these concepts! We just haven’t given them proper names yet.

A glvalue, or “generalized lvalue”, covers exactly the “has identity” property, ignoring movability. An rvalue covers exactly the “can move” property, ignoring identity. And that’s it! You now know all the five value categories.

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I got a user submitted question to CppQuiz.org the other day where the contributor had gotten the answer wrong, and I didn’t notice at first. The question was about non-virtual destructors:

#include <iostream>

struct B {
  B() {
    std::cout << 'b';
  }
  ~B() {
    std::cout << 'B';
  }
};

struct D : B {
  D() {
    std::cout << 'd';
  }
  ~D() {
    std::cout << 'D';
  }
};

int main() {
  B* p = new D;
  delete p;
}

As usual on CppQuiz, the objective is to figure out the output of the program, according to the C++ standard. Before continuing, please try to find the answer yourself!

What does the standard say?

Did you reply bdB? So did the person who contributed the question, and I initially went “yep, that seems logical”. It does indeed seem logical that these functions are called, but what exactly happens when we fail to destroy the derived part of an object? Let’s have a look at §5.3.5/3 in the C++11 standard:

if the static type of the object to be deleted is different from its dynamic type, the static type shall be a base class of the dynamic type of the object to be deleted and the static type shall have a virtual destructor or the behavior is undefined.

The static type here is B, which is indeed a base class of the dynamic type D. The static type B does however not have a virtual destructor, so the behavior is undefined. (I have yet to see a compiler who doesn’t print bdB though.)

So why is this undefined behavior? It would be hard for the standard to specify exactly what happens when an object is not properly destroyed.

In practice, most compilers will probably go with the normal rules for virtual functions, print bdB, and simply not destroy the D part of the object. But since the behavior is undefined, there’s no guarantee for this.

One could argue that even if the result of not destroying D properly is undefined, the standard could still mandate which destructor(s) actually get called. However, when undefined behavior occurs in a program, the entire execution is undefined, so there really would be no point.

If you’re curious about undefined behavior, I’ve written about it before. That article also has links to some really interesting, more in-depth articles about the subject.

As usual, the code for this blog post is available on GitHub.

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You might be familiar with my C++ quiz site, cppquiz.org. But did you know you can contribute your own questions to the site? First, try solving a few questions to get the gist of it, then visit http://cppquiz.org/quiz/create to create your own.

I try to live by the “quality over quantity” motto for the questions on the site, so you’ll find the following guidelines on the submission form:

• Your question should be short, and demonstrate one thing only
• Your question should compile (unless not compiling is the point)
• Your question should be about standard C++, not compiler specific or about 3rd party libraries
• Your question should not be a trick question, and be free from distractions
• Your explanation should be clear and to the point
• Your explanation should use correct terminology, and refer to the standard where possible
• Prefer well defined programs over programs with compilation errors, undefined or unspecified behaviour

But what does all of that mean?

Your question should be short, and demonstrate one thing only

The shorter the code in the question, the better. The point of a question is to teach one single aspect of C++, not to be an exercise in reading and understanding an unfamiliar code base.

Your question should compile (unless not compiling is the point)

It should be possible to copy your code verbatim and have it compile as C++11, without errors, requirements for additional includes etc. (Of course, some questions are not intended to compile, then this rule does not apply.)

Your question should be about standard C++, not compiler specific or about 3rd party libraries

This should be fairly self explanatory, don’t make questions about posix, boost, windows.h etc.

Your question should not be a trick question, and be free from distractions

I’ve refused several questions due to this. Your question is supposed to be non-trivial, but the difficulty should be to understand a concept of C++, not to read the question correctly, or find the clue in the midst of distractions. Don’t make questions where the key is noticing that the variables v1 and vl are not the same. Don’t make questions full of complicated C++ that doesn’t matter, but is just there to hide the simple core of the question.

Your explanation should be clear and the point

Don’t go on lengthy asides in the explanation. As your question is already short and demonstrates one thing only, explaining that single concept should not take too many words.

Your explanation should use correct terminology, and refer to the standard where possible

The chances of having your question published quickly increases if you use correct C++ terminology to describe the concepts in your question. It helps me a lot if you’re also able to provide references to the standard, but don’t let this stop you from contributing.

Prefer well defined programs over programs with compilation errors, undefined or unspecified behaviour

There’s a lot of fun and interesting things to learn from questions that don’t compile, or contain undefined or unspecified behaviour. It’s however not so fun when most of the questions on the site can be answered simply by enumerating those three alternatives as an answer.

That’s it! I hope I didn’t scare you away from contributing. Please have a go, and don’t be afraid to ask if you have any questions about your question! :)