Aspen, Monday, May 15: These are just quick notes, and I apologize if they might not very coherent. I have little time to jot them down because the day was filled with talks and discussions. There are two main topics people are excited about: concurrency and template metaprogramming.

In the morning I went to Christopher Kohlhoff talk about Boost.Asio. Asio stands for Asynchronous IO. The problem is how to structure your program to deal with a lot of asynchronous calls. There are two main difficulties: resource management and inversion of control. An async-driven program is essentially a collection of disjoint callbacks. When control jumps from one callback to another, you can easily lose track of who is the owner of which resources, how to get hold of them, and how to reason about the whole system. Chris showed how to deal with resources, essentially by using shared, reference-counted, pointers. When you’re making an asynchronous call you usually have to make sure that the completion handler shares some resources with the caller. In Chris’s approach these resources are encapsulated in a Connection object and the completion handlers are methods of that object. So when a handler is called, it has access to the “this” pointer and can share data with the caller. A handler must take part in the reference counting of the Connection object, so that the object doesn’t suddenly disappear. Considering that a lot of event-driven code I’ve seen over the years used global shared data to store state, this is progress. The inversion of control is still a problem though.

Hartmut Kaiser talked about the Phoenix library, which essentially implements C++ inside C++. It is built on top of Proto (which is a big hit at the conference–more about it later). From what I gathered, Phoenix is mostly a better lambda. You can write anonymous functions in Phoenix using a very stylized C++: for instance, instead of braces, you use brackets, instead of semicolons, commas, etc. One advantage of Phoenix functions is that they can be statically polymorphic. Unfortunately the main example didn’t require polymorphism, and in fact would be much easier on the eyes if it were written using C++ lambdas. The other, more important advantage of Proto is that it’s highly customizable. Hartmut showed an example of how to extend C++ syntax to support parallelism. Behind the scenes, Phoenix took advantage of OpenMP, which is a system of ugly pragmas supported by many compilers to create parallel loops and other concurrent constructs.

An then there was a Proto marathon by Joel Falcou, after which I had a long discussion with him over dinner. Proto is a metaprogramming tour de force. If I described it as a library for constructing embedded domain-specific languages in C++, I wouldn’t give it justice. It’s a system that tricks the C++ compiler into parsing expressions into full-blown compile-time abstract syntax trees, which are at the same time function objects that can be executed at runtime. If this is not impressive enough, Proto provides multiple customization mechanism that allow you to plug in new constructs, give them specific semantics, and even rewrite the ASTs. Joel gave an example of an EDSL for expressing analytical functions, which could analytically calculate derivatives of functions at compile time. Joel is coming to my talk tomorrow and I hope he will be able to explain to me what I’m doing. My talk is essentially about how to get to grips with Proto by using Haskell monads. We’ll see how it goes.