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!

Maintainability and Refactoring Impact of Higher-Level Design Features

by Titus Winters

Summary of the talk:

Higher levels of abstraction are useful for building things out of, but also have a higher cognitive and maintenance cost. That is, it's a lot easier to refactor a function than it is to change a type, and similarly easier to deal with a single concrete type than a class template, or a Concept, or a meta-Concept ... In this talk I'll present example strategies for refactoring the interface of functions, classes, and class templates. I'll also discuss how the recent addition of Concepts and the proposals for even-more-abstract features affect long-term refactoring in C++. If you're interested in refactoring and it isn't immediately clear that a Concept published in a library can never change, this talk is for you.