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 some upcoming talks that you will be able to attend this year. Here’s another CppCon future talk we hope you will enjoy – and register today for CppCon 2021 to attend in person, online, or both!

Embracing PODs Safely Until They Die

Thursday, October 28 • 10:30am - 11:30am

by Alisdair Meredith and Nina Ranns

Summary of the talk:

How do you change the active member of a union? Can you copy an object without
a publicly callable copy constructor? Can you pass classes having private data to
a function implemented in C? What is the use case for the library type trait
`std::is_trivially_move_assignable`? All these questions and more will be answered
in this session.

PODs --- Plain Old Data --- are neither plain nor old in C++11, and continued to
evolve in every published standard since, until they were finally banished in C++20.
In researching the deconstruction of PODs for the upcoming book, "Embracing
Modern C++ Safely" Alisdair Meredith (and the other authors including John
Lakos, Vittorio Romeo, and Rostislav Khlebnikov) discovered that many of the
intuitive properties and capabilities of trivial and standard layout types did not
behave quite as expected, and there are many subtleties waiting to catch the
unwary. Nina Ranns, as an active member of the Core working group, stepped in
to explain and resolve many concerns, while pointing out further bad assumptions.
Together they will present the use cases, pitfalls, and annoyances of these features
as now properly understood, giving a flavor of the presentation style of each of the
57 C++11/14 features presented in the book.