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While we wait for this year’s event, we’re featuring videos of some of the 100+ talks from CppCon 2015 for you to enjoy. Here is today’s feature:

Templator: Demo of a nice tool for Visualizing Template Instantiations

by Peter Sommerlad

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

Many C++ beginners shy away from employing templates in their code, because of the myth of templates being hard. Even seasoned C++ developers can have problems manually interpreting template code correctly as Olve Maudal's C++ pub quiz demonstrates. Overloads and template specializations make it hard for programmers and also IDEs to show a developer what happens without compiling a program and even with a compile one might not get, what actually happens unless an unintelligible error message from your compiler appears.

My students tried to alleviate that problem by visualizing template instantiation and overload selection in a C++ IDE and allow to navigate through template code in instantiation context that a compiler would only create internally and that is otherwise not available for humans. While still in its nascent state I hope to show what is possible and if things go as planned at the time of the submission you should be able to solve the template pub quiz questions without running the programs.