Registration is now open for CppCon 2023! The conference starts on October 1 and will be held in person in Aurora, CO. 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 2023!

Thinking Functionally in C++

Monday, October 2 • 15:15 - 16:15

by Brian Ruth

Summary of the talk:

C++ is a multi-paradigm language, supporting OO, procedural and functional programming styles. Functional languages conjure up thoughts of academic languages; immutable data and mathematical terms like monad and higher order functions. We’ve been told of the advantages of functional languages, specifically when it comes to parallelization and safety, but very few of them are ever used in production code. However, what if we were to take the mindset of functional programming and apply it to existing C++ codebases? How will it change the way we write and think about our code? In this talk, we will explore ways to think functionally about your code and how to modify it using functional techniques. We will explore some of the additions C++ has made to aid in functional programming in the form of views, lambdas and ranges and how those fit into an existing OO or procedural codebase. We will finish up by looking at functional design considerations and their tradeoffs. After leaving this talk you should have the tools to identify instances in your code where using functional thinking will improve its performance, reusability and security.