Doug's Compiler Corner

Swift for C++ Practitioners, Part 13: Flexible Array Members Flexible array members are an odd feature of C that is intended to capture the pattern of a variable-length structure consisting of a header followed by an array of some element type.

Swift for C++ Practitioners, Part 12: Move Semantics Since their introduction in C++11, move semantics have been an integral part of programming in C++.

Swift for C++ Practitioners, Part 11: Domain-Specific (Embedded) Languages with Result Builders The prior installment of this series covered operator overloading in Swift in great detail.

Swift for C++ Practitioners, Part 10: Operator Overloading One of the ways in which C++ lets you define library types that feel like built-in types is operator overloading: you can define you own type (say, an big integer or a matrix type), and along with…

Swift for C++ Practitioners, Part 9: Extensible Literals One of the things that I really liked about C++ was the ability to create great libraries: the combination of classes, templates, and operator overloading made it possible to create abstractions that

Swift for C++ Practitioners, Part 8: Global Variables At the end of part 7, I promised I was going to talk about Swift language extensibility next.

Swift for C++ Practitioners, Part 7: Closures Throughout this series, I've been using closures in examples without really defining them.

Swift for C++ Practitioners, Part 6: Error Handling C++ has a few different mechanisms for handling errors.

Swift for C++ Practitioners, Part 5: Type erasure & metatypes What do you do in C++ when you want to support different types, but don't want to have one template instantiation per type?

Swift for C++ Practitioners, Part 4: Generics Swift's generics system is, on its surface, similar to C++ templates: functions and types can be parameterized (e.g., a Set type has a parameter T) and can be used with any suitable generic arguments (e.g., Se…

Swift for C++ Practitioners, Part 3: Extensions and Access Control Let's take a short break from the Swift type system to talk a bit about code organization in Swift, which is quite different from how it's handled in C++.

Swift for C++ Practitioners, Part 2: Reference Types & Optionals In our first episode, we talked a lot about value types.

Swift for C++ Practitioners, Part 1: Intro & Value Types There is a Getting Started guide for Swift that's good for a general audience.