Marshall's April Update

By Marshall Clow on
May 1, 2019

There are four main areas where I spend my time.

  • Libc++, where I am the “code owner”
  • WG21, where I am the chair of the Library Working Group (LWG)
  • Boost
  • Speaking at conferences

Libc++

The next big milestone for libc++ is the LLVM 9.0 release this summer. We’re working towards that, implementing new features and fixing bugs.

As the “code owner” for libc++, I also have to review the contributions of other people to libc++, and evaluate and fix bugs that are reported. That’s a never-ending task; there are new contributions ever day.

LWG papers implemented this month.

  • P0811 Add std::midpoint and std::lerp for C++20

LWG issues resolved this month

  • 2960 nonesuch is insufficiently useless
  • 2977 unordered_meow::merge() has incorrect Throws: clause
  • 2164 What are the semantics of vector.emplace(vector.begin(), vector.back())?

LLVM features implemented this month (certainly incomplete)

  • Fixed the implementations of list::remove_if and list::unique to deal with values or predicates that are elements in the list. Same for forward_list. We did this for remove already, but now we do it for the other operations as well.

  • Added a bunch of new tests for things that we were missing ** list::sort and forward_list::sort are required to be stable. ** You can’t use match_results until you’ve done a regex search. Our tests did this in several places; now we have assertions to prevent that. `

LLVM bugs resolved this month (probably incomplete)

  • Bug 41323 Race condition in steady_clock::now for _LIBCPP_WIN32API
  • Bug 41130 operator/ of std::chrono::duration and custom type.
  • Bug 41577 test/std/utilities/optional/optional.object/optional.object.ctor/move.fail.cpp has wrong assumption.
  • I spent a fair amount of time on Bug 39696 “Workaround “error: ‘(9.223372036854775807e+18 / 1.0e+9)’ is not a constant expression”; which turned out to be a GCC bug on PowerPC machines.

Also, there was a series of general cleanups in the libc++ tests to improve portability and readability. I added a bunch of updates for debug-mode, and there were several places where we assumed that string::compare returned -1/0/1 instead of what was specified, which is \<0/0/\>0. Also, I added tests for std::any_cast and array types.

The current status of libc++ can be found here:

WG21

There were no WG21 meetings in April. However, LWG held three teleconferences this month, reviewing papers in advance of the July meeting. We’ll have more teleconferences in May.

I am working on more “cleanup” papers similar to P1458 - Mandating the Standard Library: Clause 16 - Language support library, and my P0805 - Comparing Containers needs an update.

The goal of the July meeting is to have a “Committee Draft” (CD) of the proposed C++20 standard that can be sent out for review.

Also on my TODO list is to attempt to implement some of the proposals that are coming up for a vote in July (flat_map, text formatting, etc).

Boost

We released Boost 1.70 on the 12th of April.

Once again, I was the release manager, which involved a bunch of “process management”; things like assembling the release candidates, packaging up release notes, deciding which problems that came up would be fixed (and which ones would not), and updating the web site (and so on, and so on).

Conferences

This was a big travel month. I gave two presentations:

In May, I will be speaking at:

  • CppNow, May 5-10 in Aspen, CO

I have submitted a talk for CppCon in September, but I will not hear back about this for a month or two.

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