This year, CppCon 2020 is going virtual. The dates are still the same – September 14-18 – and we are aiming for the CppCon live event to have pretty much everything you’re familiar with at CppCon except moved online: multiple tracks including “back to basics” and a new “embedded” track; live speaker Q&A; live talk time zones friendly to Americas and EMEA (and we’re going to try to arrange around-the-clock recorded repeats in all time zones, where speakers who are available can be available for live Q&A in their repeated talks too, and we’ll do that if it’s possible – but we’re still working on it!); virtual tables where you can interact face-to-face online with other attendees just like at the physical event; virtual exhibitor spaces where you can meet the folks on your favorite product’s teams to ask them question face-to-face; pre- and post-conference classes; and even the CppCon house band playing live before every plenary session. All talk recordings will be freely available as usual on YouTube a month or two after the event, but everything else above will be available only live during CppCon week.

To whet your appetite for this year’s conference, here’s another of the top-rated talks from last year. Enjoy – and register today for CppCon 2020 – all the spirit and flavor of CppCon, this year all virtual and online!

C++20: C++ at 40

by Bjarne Stroustrup

Summary of the talk:

It is now 40 years since C++ (then called C with Classes) had its first non-research user. It is now 35 years since the first commercial release of C++. It is now 30 years since the start of the standards process.

So what is C++? I will try to explain what's great about C++, C++20, as a modern language, not treating it as a layer cake of features. Imagine you have never heard of C, C with Classes, or C++11. How do classes, templates, and lambdas fit together? What have constructors and destructors to do with exceptions? What's in the standard library? How can we start using C++?

Finally, I will make a few comments about how to get from older styles of C++ use to modern C++ and point to areas where we need to improve C++ further.