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!

What You Can Learn from Being Too Cute: Why You Should Write Code That You Should Never Write

Friday, October 29 • 1:30pm - 2:30pm

by Daisy Hollman

Summary of the talk:

During the COVID-19 global pandemic, as we all searched for ways to stay connected to the C++ community, I innocently started posting short, 25-line or less C++ snippets of counterintuitive C++ code that I called my "Cute C++ trick of the day." I was floored by the amount of attention these tweets received, with some being viewed more than 30,000 times and liked or retweeted hundreds of times. I received repeated requests to collect these tricks into a library or talk, and this is that talk.

In this presentation, I will dissect a few of my most popular "Cute C++ tricks" to a level of detail not possible on social media platforms like Twitter. I'll talk about how and why these tricks work the way they do, talk about the dark corners of C++ they touch upon, and talk about what you should actually do if you need to produce the same effect in production code. While not targeted at beginners, these tricks span the gauntlet from features that most intermediate programmers are aware of (but never thought to use in a particular way) to dark corners of the language that many of my C++ committee colleagues were surprised to learn about. Throughout it all runs a common thread: learning how to exploit your own curiosity to expand your toolbox, gain a better grasp of the fundamentals of C++, and ultimately, become a better programmer.