Andrei Alexandrescu

Andrei Alexandrescu (born 1969) is a Romanian-American C++ and D language programmer and author. He is particularly known for his pioneering work on policy-based design implemented via template metaprogramming. These ideas are articulated in his book '' Modern C++ Design'' and were first implemented in his programming library, Loki. He also implemented the " move constructors" concept in his MOJO library. He contributed to the '' C/C++ Users Journal'' under the byline "Generic". Alexandrescu worked as a research scientist at Facebook, before departing the company in August 2015 in order to focus on developing the D programming language.

He became an American citizen in August 2014.

Education and career

Alexandrescu received a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Polytechnic University of Bucharest (''Universitatea Politehnica din București'') in July 1994.

His first article was published in the '' C/C++ Users Journal'' in September 1998. He was a program manager for Netzip, Inc. from April 1999 until February 2000. When the company was acquired by RealNetworks, Inc., he served there as a development manager from February 2000 through September 2001.

Alexandrescu earned an M.S. (2003) and a PhD (2009) in computer science from the University of Washington.

More recently, he has been assisting Walter Bright in the development of the D programming language. Alexandrescu released a book titled ''The D Programming Language'' in May 2010.

From 2010 to 2014, Alexandrescu, Herb Sutter, and Scott Meyers ran a small annual technical conference called ''C++ and Beyond''.

Contributions

Expected

Expected is a template class for C++ which is on the C++ Standards track. Alexandrescu proposes Expected as a class for use as a return value which contains either a T or the exception preventing its creation, which is an improvement over use of either return codes or exceptions exclusively. Expected can be thought of as a restriction of sum (union) types or algebraic datatypes in various languages, e.g., Hope, or the more recent Haskell and Gallina; or of the error handling mechanism of Google's Go, or th
Result
type in Rust.

He explains the benefits of Expected as:
* Associates errors with computational goals
* Naturally allows multiple exceptions in flight
* Switch between "error handling" and "exception throwing" styles
* Teleportation possible across thread boundaries, across nothrow subsystem boundaries and across time (save now, throw later)
* Collect, group, combine exceptions

Example

For example, instead of any of the following common function prototypes:


int parseInt(const string&); // Returns 0 on error and sets errno.


or


int parseInt(const string&); // Throws invalid_input or overflow


he proposes the following:


Expected parseInt(const string&); // Returns an expected int: either an int or an exception


Scope guard

From 2000 onwards, Alexandrescu has advocated and popularized the scope guard idiom. He has introduced it as a language construct in D. It has been implemented by others in many other languages.

Bibliography

*
*
*

References

External links

Alexandrescu's homepage
– Contains links to downloadable Loki libraries for various compilers.
*
Interviu MONEY.ro: Facebook face angajări în România
', 1 March 2010

{{DEFAULTSORT:Alexandrescu, Andrei
Romanian computer scientists
C++ people
Politehnica University of Bucharest alumni
University of Washington alumni
Living people
Scientists from Bucharest
Facebook employees
1969 births
Romanian emigrants to the United States
Programming language designers