Registration is now open for CppCon 2021, which starts on October 24 and will be held both in person and online. To whet your appetite for this year’s conference, we’re posting videos of some of the top-rated talks from our most recent in-person conference in 2019 and our online conference in 2020. Here’s another CppCon talk video we hope you will enjoy – and why not register today for CppCon 2021 to attend in person, online, or both!

A C++ Approach to Physical Units

by Mateusz Pusz

Summary of the talk:

This talk presents a new C++20 library for Dimensional Analysis and Physical Units handling. The essential requirements of the library are user-friendliness, compile-time safety, no runtime overhead, and easy extensibility. The syntax of the library is built around a few easy to learn concepts and strictly checked at compile time, which makes it easy to learn and very forgiving for the novice.

The talk presents motivating examples of why we need such a library, compares the library with other similar products on the market, describes the basic usage and interface, and highlights the benefits of the design choices made.

The talk is also a great showcase of practical usage of new C++20 features that make the library interface easier to use, maintain, and extend. Concepts, contracts, class types provided as non-type template parameters, and other C++20 features make a huge difference in how we can design Modern C++ code.