FY2023 Annual Report – Standard C++ Foundation

(fiscal year ending 2023-06-30)

Highlights

This fiscal year FY2023 from 2022-07-01 to 2023-06-30 was our third full year since the start of the pandemic, and the first year really recovering from the pandemic's effects. Although most of the Foundation’s work is done virtually, the pandemic did affect some of our prominent operations, including that CppCon 2021 and 2022 were held, but were hybrid for the first time. Planning is now well underway for Cpp 2023 which will fall into the next fiscal year, and will be back to onsite-only again for the first time since before the pandemic.

As in every recent year, the majority of funds received and spent in FY2023 were from running CppCon, which still had large expenses even though it was hybrid with mostly-online attendees in FY2022 and FY2023.

ETA: As we came out of the pandemic, per our financial assistance policy the Foundation resumed spending on supporting in-person ISO C++ standardization. In FY2022, the ISO C++ committee (WG21) resumed holding in-person meetings, with online Zoom participation; the Standard C++ Foundation paid in whole or in part for hosting three of the first four post-pandemic WG21 meetings, two of which fell into FY2023 and one of which will fall into FY2024 but was paid for in part in FY2023. The Foundation also provided financial travel assistance to four expert participants whose ISO C++ proposals had been encouraged by WG21 but who would not otherwise have been able to attend to progress their proposals. — Thank you very much once again to the Foundation's members and all the CppCon attendees and sponsors! Your support directly enables the Foundation to be able to pay for these ISO meetings and support ISO participants from around the world.

CppCon

Every year, the Foundation runs the CppCon conference, which is currently the largest C++ conference in the world. Since its inception in 2014, a goal for CppCon has been to help raise the bar for all C++ sister conferences. In our inaugural conference in 2014, we were the first C++ conference we know of to professionally record all talks and panels using a paid film crew, and make the videos available for free to everyone in the world; since then, several other conferences have followed suit, including that some have used the same video production company CppCon uses (Bash Films, which we can highly recommend). In each year since, we have continued to strive to add features, most recently professional in-room live captioning in 2019.

CppCon 2022 was held in September 2022. As with CppCon 2021, it was again a hybrid conference. This was essential because, although international governmental travel bans were mostly lifted, many companies still had travel restrictions in place due to Covid and/or the economic slowdown, and many attendees still were unable or reluctant to travel for understandable health reasons. Even so, CppCon 2022 squeaked out a new record in total attendance, with a much larger percentage of attendees returning on-site… for the first time since 2019, the exhibitor hall often felt crowded and the on-site experience felt like a normal bustling conference again!

CppCon 2023 is being held later than usual this year, and planning is still underway. The talk submissions came in right at the end of FY2022, so we do know it has the second-highest number of talk submissions ever (second only to pre-pandemic 2019). So far, we know it will be even busier on-site than last year with more attendees, volunteers, and exhibitors than last year. We thank all our sponsors, exhibitors, volunteers, and attendees, and we look forward to seeing all of them in person at our first all-in-person event since 2019.

The professionally recorded C++ videos are made available worldwide at no charge on the CppCon YouTube channel. Here are some basic channel statistics:

• combined viewership: 25.4 million views
• total watch time: 4.9 million hours
• channel subscribers: over 134,000

Next report

Our next annual report will cover the fiscal year from 2023-07-01 to 2024-06-30. Besides being published here, the annual report will also be given as usual as a live presentation at our annual Foundation members meeting which is held during the week of the autumn WG21 meeting.

About the Standard C++ Foundation

The Standard C++ Foundation (Standard CPP Foundation in some databases that don’t support + in names) is a Washington 501(c)(6) not-for-profit organization whose purpose is to support the C++ software developer community and promote the understanding and use of modern Standard C++ on all compilers and platforms. We do this by operating and funding isocpp.org, the github.com/isocpp and github.com/cplusplus repositories, the CppCon conference including CppCon.org and the CppCon YouTube channel, and providing financial assistance support for WG21 (ISO C++ committee) standards meetings for meeting hosting costs, travel assistance for attendees in financial need, and grants to progress WG21 proposals that have been encouraged but whose the authors cannot progress further without some financial assistance and that the WG21 major subgroup chairs have approved funding.

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