C++ as a service - rapid software development and dynamic interoperability with python and beyond

The C++ programming language is used for many numerically intensive scientific applications. A combination of performance and solid backward compatibility has led to its use for many research software codes over the past 20 years. Despite its power, C++ is often seen as difficult to learn and inconsistent with rapid application development. Exploration and prototyping is slowed down by the long edit-compile-run cycles during development.

In this talk we show how to leverage our experience in interactive C++, just-in-time compilation technology (JIT), dynamic optimizations, and large scale software development to greatly reduce the impedance mismatch between C++ and Python. We show how clang-repl generalizes Cling in LLVM upstream to offer a robust, sustainable and omnidisciplinary solution for C++ language interoperability.

This presentation demonstrates how we have:advanced the interpretative technology to provide a state-of-the-art C++ execution environment; enabled functionality which can provide native-like, dynamic runtime interoperability between C++ and Python; and allowed utilization of heterogeneous hardware.

The presentation includes interactive session where we demonstrate some of the capabilities of our system via the Jupyter interactive environment.