David Dean

Boost Conference

David Dean — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 22:36:36 +0000

Alisdair and I will be attending the Boost conference next week. I hope to use the opportunity to evangelize for our compiler and also to show off some of the new C++0x features that we’ve been implementing for Tiburón. I also hope it will give me some time to finally post some of the things I’ve been promising to publish such as boost results for our compilers. Stay tuned next week and I’ll do my best to get you some fun content.

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Anniversary

David Dean — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 17:06:58 +0000

Chris Bensen beat me to it:

http://chrisbensen.blogspot.com/2007/11/codegear-aniversary.html

By a staggering coincidence yesterday marked my first year at this job. (Which means I had only been a Borland employee for a single day when CodeGear was announced.)

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Call for sysops

David Dean — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 00:03:12 +0000

Why is CodeGear looking for Quality Central sysops?

As of 10/10/07 17:24 PDT, These are the number of reports in Quality Central with a status of "Reported":

Delphi	Delphi.Net	C++	C#
4008	614	157	107

according to the QC stats here:
http://qc.codegear.com/stats/

82 bug reports have come in in the last week.

Assuming we could tackle reports twice as fast as they are coming in, It would take us almost a year to handle the backlog. We don’t want to wait that long. If you want to help CodeGear, you can become a QC sysop.

What does a QC sysop do?

You can find out here:
http://dn.codegear.com/article/33867

If this sounds like something you want to do, please drop either myself or Chris Pattinson an email to request to become a sysop. Please indicate the area where you think you would be best suited and why you would make a good sysop.

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C++Builder 2007 Features - New Dinkumware and iterator debugging

David Dean — Wed, 23 May 2007 15:05:44 +0000

C++Builder 2007 Features - New Dinkumware and iterator debugging<br />

C++Builder 2007 - New Dinkumware and iterator debugging

C++Builder 2007 includes the newest dinkumware runtime libraries. (v5.01)
This should bring a bunch of fixes, but more interesting is the new feature of iterator debugging.
This will help you to detect when you are using iterators incorrectly. Here is an example of using an
iterator after it has become invalid. (due to erasing an element in the container)

//—————————————————————————

#pragma hdrstop
#define _HAS_ITERATOR_DEBUGGING 1
#include
#include

//—————————————————————————
#pragma argsused
int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
std::vector v ;
v.push_back(1);
v.push_back(3);
v.push_back(7);
v.push_back(15);
std::vector::iterator i = v.begin();
++i;
std::vector::iterator j = v.end();
–j;
std::cout

When you run that from a command line you will see:

C:\Projects\Debug>dereferenced_iterator.exe
15
error: vector iterator not dereferencable, at
c:\program files\codegear\rad studio\5.0\include\dinkumware\vector: 60

Abnormal program termination

Here is another example where two incompatible iterators are compared:

//—————————————————————————

#pragma hdrstop

//—————————————————————————
#define _HAS_ITERATOR_DEBUGGING 1
#include
#include
using namespace std;

// The function object multiplies an element by a Factor
template
class MultValue
{
private:
Type Factor; // The value to multiply by
public:
// Constructor initializes the value to multiply by
MultValue(const Type& val ) : Factor(val) { }

// The function call for the element to be multiplied
void operator()(Type& elem) const
{
elem *= Factor;
}
};

#pragma argsused
int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
vector v1;
vector v2;

v1.push_back(10);
v1.push_back(20);

v2.push_back(10);
v2.push_back(20);

// This next line will assert because v1 and v2 are
// incompatible.
for_each(v1.begin(), v2.end(), MultValue(-2));
return 0;
}

//—————————————————————————

and the output:

C:\Projects\Debug>incompatible_iterators.exe
error: vector iterators incompatible, at
c:\program files\codegear\rad studio\5.0\include\dinkumware\vector: 179

Update:
Formatting got messed up when transitioned to WordPress

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BCB 6 Help files are now available for download

David Dean — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 16:40:12 +0000

The following article tells you how to get the help files which were included with Borland C++ Builder 6
http://dn.codegear.com/article/34064

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Another morsel…

David Dean — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 17:50:30 +0000

Another delphi.nontech post which may be of interest to the C++ community.
Michael Swindell says:

We will be realigning the editions and the notion of the Studio this year. We will have separate Win32 focused Delphi and C++ releases, then later a studio that includes .NET and Win32. We will also be releasing products on a more frequent basis - smaller releases with focused features and high quality which is going to make studio subscriptions a much more popular and cost effective model for customers. Nick is updating the Roadmap and will be launching it in coordination with some announcements we have coming on.

I’m eager for these announcements to be made, because I’m pretty sure that I cannot comment until they happen.
I’m pretty sure I can say these since Michael did:

Separate Win32 C++ release
Studio product later
Studio subcriptions more valuable because of more frequent product releases.

Go CodeGear!

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Nick Let a cat out of the bag…

David Dean — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 11:34:30 +0000

Nick Hodges (The Delphi Product Manager) doesn’t usually talk about C++, but he mentioned something that I was eager to talk about.
Those of you who don’t read borland.public.delphi.non-technical (and maybe even some of you who do) could have easily missed a jewel buried in this thread:

<http://groups.google.com/group/borland.public.delphi.non-technical/browse_thread/thread/3898a5f36255b98c/d6e21acf04fbd49#7d6e21acf04fbd49> or
<http://tinyurl.com/yls9ru>

Where Nick says:

>Lance R. wrote:
>> Does Delphi 2006 (BDS) support Pre-build / Post-build event command
>> line actions like VS2005 does?
>
> No, but the next release of Delphi will, as it will use MSBuild as the
> build engine.

and then later in the thread:

> If by "Macros" you mean MSBuild Actions, then since we use MSBuild,
> you’ll be able to use any and all MS Actions in your build.
>
>> I assume this would be for VCL as well as the .NET side?
>
> Yes, even C++, something MS wasn’t able to do.

What does this mean to us C++ developers?

A small dig against the competition.
Extremely configurable build system.
No more messing around with bdsproj2mak/bpr2mak.
Identical results when building from IDE and the command line.
Much faster builds in the IDE. (IDE sometimes faster than command line)

I’ll blog some more about the above in the future, but I didn’t want you guys to miss hearing about this.

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Am I late to the party?

David Dean — Tue, 26 Dec 2006 16:59:22 +0000

I’ve been a CodeGear Employee for a several weeks now, and I should have started blogging sooner. The C++ personality of our IDE was very important to me before I started working here because I used it every day. Now I get to be part of the process of improving it. (And I have no illusions that it’s going to be quick and easy) I am trying to keep track of hundreds of reports that I want to see fixed ASAP. I have automations to write, benchmarking to plan, and performance to measure. So where are the pressure points when you use C++ in BDS? Because I want to do something about them. If you leave QC #s in the comments. I’ll add them to my (very long) list.

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