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!

Path Tracing Three Ways: A Study of C++ Style

by Matt Godbolt

Summary of the talk:

C++ is a multi-paradigm language allowing us as developers to pick and choose among a variety of styles: procedural, functional, object oriented, hybrids, and more. How does the style of programming we choose affect code clarity, testability, ease of changes, compile time and run-time performance?

In this talk Matt will show a toy path tracer project (a form of ray tracer) implemented in three different styles: traditional object oriented, functional, and data-oriented design. He'll then compare and contrast his experiences developing in each case, showing how often the compiler is able to reduce each style to similar performing code. There's certain to be some surprises - and of course some Compiler Explorer usage!