The Rundown Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, my classes have been moved online. It’s certainly an interesting way to teach, but admittedly I can’t say it’s enjoyable or effective. However, it has given me a lot of time to work on various projects, which is a reasonable trade-off (at least in my opinion). I got quite a bit done this month due to the substantial increase in leisure time, and was able to work on several projects that previously didn’t fit into my schedule. Boost.StaticString I s...

Coding in the time of a Pandemic It has been an interesting month, there having been the minor distraction of a lockdown of our little country. The borders with Spain and France were closed about three weeks ago and all residents have been asked to stay at home other than to buy groceries or walk their dogs. Fortunately I have dogs so I at least have a legitimate reason to see the sun. One of the advantages of living in a tiny country is that the government has been able to secure the suppl...

Introduction I’m a first-year university student at the University of Connecticut pursuing a degree in Computer Science. I joined The C++ Alliance near the end of January as a part-time Staff Engineer at the recommendation of Vinnie, who has been mentoring me for the past several months. I’ve been programming in C++ for around 2 years now, with an interest in library development and standardization. My original reasoning for choosing C++ over other languages was a little misguided, being tha...

The Lesser HTTP Refactor Aside from the normal answering of queries and issues, February has been a month dominated by the difference between the asio::DynamicBuffer_v1 and asio::DynamicBuffer_v2 concepts. As I understand things, both Beast and Asio libraries developed the idea of the DynamicBuffer concept (or more correctly, Named Type Requirement [NTR]) at roughly the same time, but with slightly different needs. The original Asio DyanmicBuffer describes a move-only type, designed to be ...

History This is my first entry on the C++ Alliance web site. I’m very happy to say that I was invited to join the organisation at the end of December last year. I first met Vinnie on Slack when I chose to use Boost.Beast in a greenfield project - a highly scalable market data distribution system and quoting gateway for the Japanese cryptocurrency exchange liquid.com. There were a number of candidates for C++ HTTP frameworks and it is interesting for me to examine the decision-making proces...