This post was originally published on Info World
The pet project that changed C++ development
Compiler Explorer is now one of the most popular resources among developers. The surname of its creator, Matt Godbolt, became a verb (godbolting), describing the process of diving into the underlying assembly code to understand compiler optimizations and how modern compilers work.
Godbolt works in low-latency trading, where faster code means identifying profitable trading opportunities more quickly and efficiently. In his CppCon 2017 keynote presentation, What Has My Compiler Done for Me Lately?, Matt shared insights he learned from Compiler Explorer after building it. In an interview with JetBrains’s C++ team a month after that CppCon presentation, Godbolt shared the story of the project:
A friend and I were considering whether we could use range-for instead of a normal for-loop, but we wanted to be sure the compiler generated good code for the new feature. I hacked together a quick script to quickly dump the compiler output and Compiler Explorer was born!
What started as a pet project to help a trading systems developer in his daily work changed the whole community landscape. People are now using Compiler Explorer widely, posting permalinks on the site to share code samples. It
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