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!

Non-conforming C++: the Secrets the Committee Is Hiding From You

by Miro Knejp

Summary of the talk:

These days everyone talks about conforming and portable C++. Compiler vendors celebrate increasing conformance. Committee agents blind us with new shiny toys coming to the language. But there is a darker side to C++. A C++ you are not supposed to know about.

What if I told you there was more to C++ than what the agents of The Committee want us to believe? Over decades programmers all around the world have added features to the language in form of compiler extensions that let us do even greater things. Some are completely new, and some are lifted from C to C++ to allow some interesting, and sometimes more efficient, application.

We will see how statements can become expressions, how "goto" with extra superpowers can make your programs faster, and why there exists an operator named after a famous rock star. These are just a few examples of what to expect as listing any more would draw unwanted attention from The Committee. Unfortunately, because these extensions are not part of ISO C++, using any of them comes at the expense of portability. Or does it?