November 2009 Meeting

Topic:

Metaprogramming in D : Some Real-world Examples

Speaker:

Bill Baxter

When:

Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Presentation @ 7:00pm

Where:

Microsoft Corporation
One Microsoft Way
Redmond, Washington 98052
Building 41 (Building 41 is at the corner of NE 31st and 156th Ave NE)
[ Map | Microsoft Campus Map ]

Description:

In the D Programming Language it is possible for even mere mortals to write code that executes at compile-time.  And the resulting code is generally even human readable!  In this talk I'll show some of the metaprogramming techniques available in D today, primarily by examining various tricks I've found useful in my own code -- in vector and matrix classes, in my port of the OpenMesh C++ library to D, and so on.  I'll make some attempt to relate these back to C++ as well, though my threshold for pain is not very high.

About the Speaker:

Bill Baxter is a researcher in the eXtreme Computing Group of Microsoft Research, currently working on GPU applications.  Before moving to Washington earlier this year, Bill was a computer graphics researcher and frequent sushi consumer at OLM Digital in Tokyo, the company best known for its Pokemon animations.   Bill has been using C++ for about 15 years, and D for the last three.   Bill has a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  Sometimes he can be found strumming a guitar to temporarily escape the workaday worries of the world.