Aliasing: Risks, Opportunities and Techniques

The notion of aliasing in C++ is one of the trickiest legacy attributes inherited from C. Prevalent when writing object-oriented code, it can cause hard-to-spot functional bugs and far-too-common performance penalties.

In this talk we'll learn where aliasing appears, how impactful it can be, and how we can avoid it when needed. We'll also see when we might harness it to our advantage when appropriate.

We'll see and understand various examples of unexpected behavior and performance, and learn to inspect our code for common aliasing pitfalls.

We'll learn the details of strict aliasing rules, and use them to understand how to use get the compiler to understand what we mean. We'll understand how strong-typedefs, value-based design and various potential standards-proposals can be used to make our code more readable and more expressive.