Interrupt-Driven

Software Engineering radio recently had two episodes which are of particular interest to the C/C++ developer.

First Scott Meyers gives a nice high-level overview on the features of the upcoming C++0x standard covering Lambda expressions, Uniform initialization, Initializer lists, threading and Variadic templates amongst others. Wikipedia has a good article covering C++0x in more detail. The episode is quite entertaining not only because Scott is a good speaker but also because Markus, the host of the podcast (a Java-guy), apparently has several C++WTF moments. Link - Episode 159 C++0x.

The second episode is with Johan Bezem who is talking about MISRA which is a set of guidelines for C/C++ development promoting safety and reliability. MISRA was developed and still is mainly in use in the automotive industry. To be frank the episode isn’t as entertaining as the one with Scott but i finished it because it provides an interesting perspective on C development for small/deeply embedded systems. Link - Episode 152 MISRA.

The upcoming gcc4.4 release adds a few more C++0x features (initializer lists, auto typed variables, defaulted and deleted functions, strongly typed enums, …) to the in this regard still very incomplete g++. To be able to play with it one has to compile a gcc-snapshot which turned out to be fairly easy.

• Download a copy of the gcc-core and the gcc-g++ snapshot from here. I used gcc-core-4.4-20090306.tar.bz2 and gcc-g++-4.4-20090306.tar.bz2
• Extract both archives into the same directory. tar xvjf gcc-core-4.4-20090306.tar.bz2 && tar xvjf gcc-g++-4.4-20090306.tar.bz2 && cd gcc-4.4-20090306
• run configure ./configure --prefix=$SOMEPLACEBe sure not to overwrite your default gcc-installation. If anything is missing configure will complain.
• On my Ubuntu system i had to install libmpfr-dev to proceed. sudo apt-get install libmpfr-dev
• Now all it takes is time…make && make install

To use it just put $SOMEPLACE in front of your $PATH. If you are using it to compile code which uses C++0x features (which is the whole point) you have to add -std=c++0x to your compiler command line. Bonus: If you are using Eclipse/CDT you can start it with the modified path and the builder will pickup the new gcc just fine.