This year we had a wonderful C++ start at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. The Department of Computer Science and Engineering was honored to have Prof. Bjarne Stroustrup giving a seminar on C++ to start the semester.

We are always happy to have Bjarne Stroustrup with us. Since 2019 he holds a Honorary Doctorate by Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and he has visiting us several times.

Both talks were very well attended with a nice mix of professional developers from industry, students (bachelor, masters and PhD) and researchers and professors from several different departments.

This is a short summary of the two talks he gave:

Day 1: C++ 20: Reaching the aims of C++.

About the video

Out of necessity C++ has been an evolving language. I outline some early ideals for C++, some techniques for keeping the evolution directed, and show how C++20 comes close to many of those ideals. Specific topics ncludes type-and-resource safe code, generic programming, modularity, the elimination of the preprocessor, and error handling. Naturally, over the years, C++ has acquired many “barnacles” that can become obstacles to developing elegant and efficient code. That has been a recognized problem since the early days of C – Dennis Ritchie and I talked about it – so we must distinguish between what can be done and what should be done. The C++ Core Guidelines is the current best effort in that direction.

Day 2: Type-and-resource Safe programming in ISO Standard C++.

About the video

You can write C++ with no violations of the type system, no resource leaks, no memory corruption, no garbage collector, no limitation of expressiveness or performance degradation compared to well-written modern C++. This talk show how this can be achieved – and guaranteed – by the applying the C++ Core Guidelines, simple supporting libraries (mostly the ISO C++ standard library), and static analysis.

Many examples demonstrate how this can be done with code that’s dramatically simpler than older C++ (and C) code. This talk will touch upon RAII, type deduction, span, range checking, nullptr, initialization, invalidation,  casting and variants.