The CppCon 2015 conference program has been posted for the upcoming September conference. We’ve received requests that the program continue to be posted in “bite-sized” posts, a few sessions at a time, to make the 100+ sessions easier to absorb, so here is another set of talks. This series of posts will conclude once the entire conference program has been posted in this way.

The following interrelated CppCon 2015 talks tackle interesting issues and more.

In this post:

• Grill the Committee
• C++ on the Web: ponies for developers without pwn’ing users
• Implementation of a component-based entity system in modern C++14
• The Current State of (free) Static Analysis
• Stop Teaching C
• Applying functional programming in code design

Grill the Committee with Jon Kalb, Chandler Carruth, Marshall Clow, Lawrence Crowl, Gabriel Dos Reis, Richard Smith, Bjarne Stroustrup, Herb Sutter, Ville Voutilainen and Michael Wong

What would you like to know about how the C++ Standard happens?

The panel is made up of members of the C++ Standards Committee and the audience asks the questions.

C++ on the Web: ponies for developers without pwn’ing users by JF Bastien, Jest-in-Time Compiler, Google

Is it possible to write apps in C++ that run in the browser with native code speed? Yes. Can you do this without the security problems associated with running native code downloaded from the net? Yes and yes. Come to this session to learn how.

We'll showcase some resource-intensive applications that have been compiled to run in the browser. These applications run as fast as native code with access to cornerstone native programming APIs—modern C++ STL, OpenGL, files and processes with full access to C++’s concurrency and parallelism—all in an architecture- and OS-agnostic packaging. Then, we'll describe how we deliver native code on the web securely, so developers get their C++ ponies and users don’t get pwn’d. We’ll also touch on the fuzzing, code randomization, and sandboxing that keep the billions of web users safe.

Implementation of a component-based entity system in modern C++14 by Vittorio Romeo

An alternative to deep inheritance trees for game and application architecture design is "composition". Separating data (in independent components) from logic (in independent systems) allows the code to be more reusable and more efficient, alongside additional benefits. Using modern C++11 and C++14 features, it is possible to design an efficient and user-friendly component-based entity system library, with intuitive syntax and convenient cost-free abstractions.

The Current State of (free) Static Analysis by Jason Turner

We will discuss the currently available free static analysis software available for C++. What kinds of errors can these tools catch? What kind do they miss? Why static analysis should be a part of your normal build process.

Stop Teaching C by Kate Gregory, Partner, Gregory Consulting

To this day most people who set out to help others learn C++ start with "introduction to C" material. I think this actively contributes to bad C++ code in the world. For the past few years I've been teaching C++ (and making suggestions to folks who intend to teach themselves) in an entirely different way. No char* strings, no strlen, strcmp, strcpy, no printf, and no [] arrays. Pointers introduced very late. References before pointers, and polymorphism with references rather than with pointers. Smart pointers as the default pointer with raw pointers (whether from new or &) reserved for times they're needed. Drawing on the Standard Library sooner rather than later, and writing modern C++ from lesson 1.

In this session I want to talk about the specific advantages of teaching C++ this way – a way that’s very different from the way you almost certainly learned the language. You’ll be pleasantly surprised to see what you get to leave for later or never cover at all, what bad habits you don't later need to correct, what complicated concepts actually become accessible to beginners, and how you spend a lot less time dictating magic spells you can't explain yet, and more showing someone a comprehensive, sensible, and understandable language.

You don't have to be a trainer to come to this session. If you ever mentor other developers and show them your C++ code, if you ever help somebody choose a book or a course or other material to learn from, or even if you occasionally feel bad that you work in a language that's hard to learn, come and see how one philosophical shift can turn that very same language into one that's actually pretty easy to learn!

Applying functional programming in code design by Michał Dominiak, Software Engineer, Nokia Networks

At first glance C++ doesn't seem to be a language that lets you do much functional programming, not to mention actually focusing the structure of your application around that. But that is changing, together with the general approach to program in the language. We do care about const-correctness; when writing code meant to run concurrently, we want to avoid locks, so we do our best not to share mutable state (I'm here to argue that uniquely owned mutable state is perfectly fine). With that mindset, we can try to design our applications in a functional way.

This talk will focus not only on things typically associated with functional programming, but also on the following in the context of C++: * Making functions pure (as long as it makes sense). * Using functional data structures. * Designing control flows that don't lead to shared state. * Composability and benefiting from laziness. * Striving for generic code. * Noticing patterns and turning them into abstractions. * Functors and monads as "patterns". * An example application built around those principles.