Friday Miscellany #4

 Welcome to another Friday Miscellany, a collection of interesting links from across the internet curated from social media, conversations and curiosity.

• It’s all about performance: Using Visual C++ 2012 to make the best use of your hardware (video on Channel 9, from the BUILD conference) begins with the engineering of auto-vectorization and auto-parallelization for existing unaltered C/C++ programs, progresses to PPL and then ties in the new C++ AMP language extensions. This is a great introduction to computer architecture and C++ compilers.
• C++ Concurrency (video on Channel 9, C++ and Beyond 2012). From the summary, "What's the difference between blocking and non-blocking styles, why on earth would you care, which kinds does C++11 support, and how are we looking at rounding it out in C++1y?"
• For one angle on how the C++ renaissance is progressing, check out The Rise and Fall of Languages in 2012 (Dr. Dobbs). "Time will tell, but I feel comfortable projecting that C++ will continue to grow in its traditional niches and will advance at the same rate as those niches grow." Do you agree?
• On StackOverflow, Does the range-based for-loop deprecate many simple algorithms?, When does a constexpr function get evaluated at compile time?, Are undeclared copy-constructors automatically inline? and std::numeric_limits::is_exact … what is a usable definition?. Active on StackOverflow or other forums? Send us your favorite questions/answers!
• Kenny Kerr has an article in the latest MSDN Magazine, The Evolution of Threads and I/O in Windows.
• What is the top Bing search result for "C++"? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%2B%2B. Is it up to date?
• Fill up your music device with software engineering podcasts from Software Engineering Radio. There is a little something for everyone.
• Love Visual C++ on Facebook!

If you have something to share, send it to me (ebattali@microsoft.com) for potential inclusion in a future miscellany.

Happy clicking!