Here’s the second part of my report of the Cpp Day 2018 organized by the Italian C++ Community. For the first part of the report look here
C++ Day 2018
Pavia, November 24th
The event was hosted at the local Department of Physics of the University of Pavia, completely free of charge!
After a quick and efficient check-in (which included receiving a ticket for free lunch!) the audience moved into the main room for the C++ Day to begin!
Summary:
- Morning talks
- Unevaluated operands: the SFINAE you don’t expect
- Lessons Learned Developing Evolutionary Algorithms in C++
- Macro free non intrusive runtime reflection system in C++
- GIS in C++
- Closing Message
SFINAE
Unevaluated operands: the SFINAE you don’t expect
Michele Caini
Until just a couple of months ago the letters SFINAE would have meant absolutely nothing for me. This misterious acronym might scare C++ novices and, in general people who are not used to templates as much as they should (and I’m putting myself on this list as well).
In a short but powerful 20 minutes presentation, Michele guides us not only towards understanding the meaning of SFINAE (which, by the way, stands for Substitution Failure Is Not An Error), but also towards a nice example on how to use it for practical purposes. His presentation contains the right balance between theory (definitions) and code to be perfectly understandable to almost everyone!
I highly suggest you to read the slides, maybe while trying to implement a similar, minimal example!
Evolutionary Algorithms
Lessons Learned Developing Evolutionary Algorithms in C++
Manlio Morini
The topic shifts completely for the presentation of Manlio which, due to the sudden abscence of another speaker, becomes a plenary one.
In 50 minutes, Manlio tries to guide us towards a general big picture of Artificial Intelligence and genetic algorithms, talkig about generating pseudo-random sequences of numbers in C++, problem states, fitness and others AI-related topuics.
To be perfectly honest, I would say that Manlio’s presentation was interesting in a general way, but missed to get to a precise point; he talked about a large number of things without actually going into details of any of these.
Reflection
Macro free non intrusive runtime reflection system in C++
Michele Caini
Time again for a presentation by Michele Caini. This time I had a hard time choosing which presentation to attend, since the other track was a nice wrap-up about the current status for C++20, by the great Alberto Barbati.
In the end I decided to trust again Michele, and although the topic of this 50 minutes talk was much harder for me, I don’t regret the choice. Talking about the (lack of) reflection in C++, Michele gave an introduction about it, discussing the difference between static and dinamic reflection, pros and cons of both, and then dived into the presentation of a minimal subset of Meta, his header-only reflection system for C++.
Another good presentation by Michele, although 50 minutes are an incredibly short time for such a complex theme, and overall what an inexperienced listener like me might still miss at the end is the answer to the question Why would I need reflection though?.
I still suggest you to read his slides, and possibly to have a look at its GitHub repository.
GIS
GIS in C++
Alberto Bignotti
The ending presentation for the Cpp day for me was about GIS, a topic I never worked on but which I always found interesting.
Alberto gave a nice but a little light presentation, with a lot of demos, some scratch of code without going much into details..
Normally I would not appreciate too much a similar approach, as I love to get dirty into the code, seeing even the smallest details to fully grasp it, but I have to say that to end the day, and after a though presentation like the one before, I did not have too much to complain about.
Alberto gave us a bit of introduction to Geographical systems, refreshing what I knew from academy, like the concepts of Datum, ellipsoid, projections and so on.
He also went a bit into the details of developing mobile GIS applications, how to handle projections and transformations, with a bit of math which was never too much wrt to the amount of code shown.
Overall, a light but interesting talk.
Closing message
This wonderful C++ Day ended with a nice closing message by the organizers, giving special prizes to the best tweets (definition of best unspecified) and thanking everyone for the attendace.
The organizers reminded everyone that they are still looking for a place for the Cpp Day 2019 so, if you are interested, you are welcome to get in touch with them!
I will probably not be there next year, as I am moving abroad from January, but I would like to take this opportunity to thank Marco and all of the staff at ++it for their incredible work and everything they have created in these years!!
