David Abrahams

Career

He is most well known for his activities related to the C++ programming language. During the standardization process that resulted in the first American national standards institute standard C++ – in 1998 – Abrahams was a principal driving force behind detailing the exception safety of the C++ Standard Library. Many of the functions and methods of the standard are specified with one of three guarantees.

Together these have become known as the Abrahams guarantees.

Abrahams has written several of the libraries and assisted in the development of others As of 2012, he still actively contributes to the group.

In 2013 Abrahams became an employee at Apple Incorporated, where he is involved in the development of the Swift programming language. In 2003, Abrahams presented Binding C++ to Python with the Boost Python Library at the ACCU Conference.

In 2005, Abrahams presented C++ Template Metaprogramming and Rvalue References, Move Semantics, and Argument Forwarding at the ACCU Conference.

Achievements

• Abrahams was also the founder and principal member of Boost Consulting (later BoostPro Computing), a company that offered software development and training courses for 12 years (2001–2013) with a heavy bias to use the Boost libraries.

Membership

In particular his contributions to the language include the delineating of a theory of exceptions, sitting on the C++ Standards Committee, being a founding member of Boost and co-authoring a book on the subject of template metaprogramming. Abrahams became a member of the C++ Standards Committee in 1996. Following the standardization, Abrahams became one of the founding members of Boost.org, a community group founded to provide reusable C++ libraries.