John Lakos - Embracing Modern C++ Safely

Pearson is dedicated to creating bias-free content that reflects the diversity of all learners. We embrace the many dimensions of diversity, including but not limited to race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, ability, age, sexual orientation, and religious or political beliefs.

Education is a powerful force for equity and change in our world. It has the potential to deliver opportunities that improve lives and enable economic mobility. As we work with authors to create content for every product and service, we acknowledge our responsibility to demonstrate inclusivity and incorporate diverse scholarship so that everyone can achieve their potential through learning. As the worlds leading learning company, we have a duty to help drive change and live up to our purpose to help more people create a better life for themselves and to create a better world.

Our ambition is to purposefully contribute to a world where:

• Everyone has an equitable and lifelong opportunity to succeed through learning.

• Our educational products and services are inclusive and represent the rich diversity of learners.

• Our educational content accurately reflects the histories and experiences of the learners we serve.

• Our educational content prompts deeper discussions with learners and motivates them to expand their own learning (and worldview).

While we work hard to present unbiased content, we want to hear from you about any concerns or needs with this Pearson product so that we can investigate and address them.

• Please contact us with concerns about any potential bias at https://www.pearson.com/report-bias.html.

I have been writing programs in C++ professionally for more than 25 years, even before it was standardized. The C++ language, in its mission to deliver zero overhead and maximum performance, necessarily provides few guardrails; syntax and type safety go only so far. Using C++ features in unsound ways and creating spectacular failures was always easy. But because the language was relatively stable, good developers over time learned how to write reliable C++ software.

The first standardized version, C++98, formalized what many already knew about the language. The second version of the Standard, C++03, included some small corrections and enhancements but did not fundamentally alter the way programs were written. What it meant to know how to program in C++, however, changed drastically with the publication of the C++11 Standard. For the first time in many years, the ISO C++ Standards Committee (WG21) added significant new functionality and removed functionality as well. For example, noexcept and std::unique_ptr were in, and the days of using dynamic exception specifications and std::auto_ptr were numbered.

At the same time, the Standards Committee announced its unprecedented commitment to deliver a new version of the C++ Standard every three years! For a large software organization, like Bloomberg, whose software asset lifetimes are measured in decades, relying on a language standard that is updated with such frequency is especially problematic. Bloomberg has been reliably and accurately providing indispensable information to the professional financial community for nearly 40 years, with services that span such diverse needs as financial analytics, trading solutions, and real-time market data.