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While we wait for this year’s event, we’re featuring videos of some of the 100+ talks from CppCon 2016 for you to enjoy. Here is today’s feature:

Using Types Effectively

by Ben Deane

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

C++ has a pretty good type system, and modern C++ gives us a greater ability than ever before to use that type system for good: to make APIs easier to use and harder to misuse, to make our datatypes more closely express our intent, and generally to make code safer, more obvious in function and perhaps even faster.

This is an interactive session - incorporating games played between presenter and audience, even - taking a look at choices available to us as datatype and API designers, and examining how a little knowledge about the algebra of algebraic datatypes can help. We'll see why std::optional and (hopefully soon) std::variant will quickly become an essential part of everyone's toolbox, and also explore how types can be used to express not just the structure of data, but also the behaviour of objects and functions.