C/C++ Programs

C++: The Programming Language back cover raises questions not answered by front

A little while ago, we considered how the cover of the book C++: The Programming Language raises questions not answered by the cover, since the cover illustration for a book putatively about the C++ programming language shows code written in JavaScript.¹ But there’s also a question raised by the back cover. According to the blurb for the book, The topics included in it are of utmost significance and are bound to provide incredible insights to students.

Leveraging BART to Assess CS1 C++ Programming Assignments using Rubric-based Criteria

arXiv:2606.03814v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper investigates rubric-aware, multitask fine-tuning of transformer models for automated grading of introductory C++ programming assignments, with the goal of producing grade predictions that better reflect instructor grading behavior than general-purpose LLMs. Using multi-semester CS1 data, student submissions are paired with numeric scores, letter-grade buckets, and assignment rubrics, then preprocessed into unified sequences for...

C++: The Documentary

C++: The Documentary premiered today on YouTube, and it was great to be on the live chat with Bjarne and many other key folks who participated in C++’s history. I’m honored to have been one of hundreds of people who have played a part in advancing Bjarne’s wonderful project over the years. If you haven’t watched this yet, make it a weekend goal.

Microsoft wants safer C# without turning it into Rust

Restartable Sequences

May 31st, 2026 @ justine's web page The best kept secret at the frontier of system programming right now is the Linux 4.18+ (c. 2018) concept of restartable sequences or rseq for short. They allow you to create thread-safe data structures without locks or atomics which scale to microprocessors with many cores. It's currently only possible to use rseq on Linux using handwritten assembly code.

Test-case reducers are underappreciated debugging tools

Test-case reducers are less well known than they should be, and those who are aware of them don’t always realise the variety of ways we can use – perhaps even abuse! – them. In this post, I’m going to explore some of the things I’ve learnt while using these wonderful tools. I’ll start at the basics, because the idea is so simple that it can be hard to believe it works.

Caspar: CUDA Accelerator for Symbolic Programming with Adaptive Reordering

arXiv:2605.30583v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present Caspar, a library that makes the power of modern GPUs more accessible in robotics and provides a state-of-the-art nonlinear GPU solver that can be applied to a wide range of different optimization problems. Caspar bridges the gap between expressive symbolic programming in Python and high-performance GPU runtimes in C++ by automatically generating optimized CUDA kernels from symbolic expressions. Building on the SymForce library,...

Devs know AI code is riddled with holes, but ship it anyway

Research by AppSec biz Checkmarx finds that 70 percent of developers believe AI-generated code has more vulnerabilities, and 30 percent knowingly ship vulnerable code into production. The report is based on responses from 2,350 global developers, CISOs, and AppSec managers, and follows similar annual surveys since 2023. The number of respondents is 54 percent higher this year than last, and the increased sample size may account for a somewhat surprising statistic: the reported proportion of...

The 29th International Obfuscated C Code Contest (IOCCC) 2025 Winners

Twenty Ninth International Obfuscated C Code Contest Where to start See below for links to the 2025 winning IOCCC entries. Check out the index.html web pages for each winning entry. They have most of the information you need to compile and run the winning program.

LLMs Lean on Priors, Not Programming Language Semantics

Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent work asks whether large language models (LLMs) condition their reasoning on explicit rules rather than statistical regularities from pretraining. Program execution provides a canonical instance: formal semantics define behavior through symbolic transition rules that can be systematically altered under distribution shift. We investigate whether LLMs can condition their reasoning on formal semantics through program execution and introduce...