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While we wait for this year’s event, we’re featuring videos of some of the 100+ talks from CppCon 2017 for you to enjoy. Here is today’s feature:

Designing A Feature That Doesn't Fit

by Patrice Roy

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

C++ is a wonderful and expressive language, that gives programmers a lot of freedom even though it actively seeks to let programmers obtain the maximal performance from their hardware. It so happens that sometimes, operating systems can make it easy to do things that are absolutely not natural for a C++ program, but that some C++ programmers consider essential to their practice.

This talk will explore the problem of adding functionality to the language, more specifically to the standard threading library, where said functionality is not a natural fit for the C++ language specification. Expressed otherwise: how can we find ways to meet the needs of users without corrupting the language we all love?

This talk will be more interesting to you if you have met situations where you wanted to do something in "pure C++" but found you had to resort to operating system-specific features to meet your objectives. We will discuss the design space that has been explored for the problem under study, and will try to make emerge the strengths and weaknesses of the various alternatives.