Description of the course “Lessons on development of 64-bit C/C++ applications”

The course is devoted to creation of 64-bit applications in C/C++ language and is intended for the Windows developers who use Visual Studio 2005/2008/2010 environment. Developers working with other 64-bit operating systems will learn much interesting as well. The course will consider all the steps of creating a new safe 64-bit application or migrating the existing 32-bit code to a 64-bit system.

The course is composed of 28 lessons devoted to introduction to 64-bit systems, issues of building 64-bit applications, methods of searching errors specific to 64-bit code and code optimization. Such questions are also considered as estimate of the cost of moving to 64-bit systems and rationality of this move.

The authors of the course:

• candidate of physico-mathematical sciences Andrey Nikolaevich Karpov;
• candidate of technical sciences Evgeniy Alexandrovich Ryzhkov.

The authors are involved in maintaining the quality of 64-bit applications and participate in development of PVS-Studio static code analyzer for verifying the code of resource-intensive applications.

The rightholder of the course is OOO “Program Verification Systems”.

• The company’s site: http://www.viva64.com.
• Contacts: e-mail: support@viva64.com, 300027, Tula, PO box 1800.

The contents of the course

• Lesson 01. What 64-bit systems are.
• Lesson 02. Support of 32-bit applications.
• Lesson 03. Porting code to 64-bit systems. The pros and cons.
• Lesson 04. Creating the 64-bit configuration.
• Lesson 05. Building a 64-bit application.
• Lesson 06. Errors in 64-bit code.
• Lesson 07. The issues of detecting 64-bit errors.
• Lesson 08. Static analysis for detecting 64-bit errors.
• Lesson 09. Pattern 01. Magic numbers.
• Lesson 10. Pattern 02. Functions with variable number of arguments.
• Lesson 11. Pattern 03. Shift operations.
• Lesson 12. Pattern 04. Virtual functions.
• Lesson 13. Pattern 05. Address arithmetic.
• Lesson 14. Pattern 06. Changing an array’s type.
• Lesson 15. Pattern 07. Pointer packing.
• Lesson 16. Pattern 08. Memsize-types in unions.
• Lesson 17. Pattern 09. Mixed arithmetic.
• Lesson 18. Pattern 10. Storage of integer values in double.
• Lesson 19. Pattern 11. Serialization and data interchange.
• Lesson 20. Pattern 12. Exceptions.
• Lesson 21. Pattern 13. Data alignment.
• Lesson 22. Pattern 14. Overloaded functions.
• Lesson 23. Pattern 15. Growth of structures’ sizes.
• Lesson 24. Phantom errors.
• Lesson 25. Working with patterns of 64-bit errors in practice.
• Lesson 26. Optimization of 64-bit programs.
• Lesson 27. Peculiarities of creating installers for a 64-bit environment.
• Lesson 28. Estimating the cost of 64-bit migration of C/C++ applications.

The course’s duration: the course implies that you study each of the 28 lessons on your own in 20-40 minutes. The total time of studying the material is about 18 hours.