Registration is now open for CppCon 2024! The conference starts on September 15 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 2024!

Contracts for C++

Wednesday, September 18 14:00 - 15:00 MDT

by Timur Doumler

Summary of the talk:

Design by Contract is a very effective approach for writing safer, more correct programs. It has been successfully implemented in programming languages like Eiffel and Ada. Attempts to add a Contracts facility to C++ have a long and storied history spanning two decades. Since the last attempt to standardise Contracts (for the C++20 Standard) has failed, SG21 — the Contracts Study Group on the C++ Standard Committee – has been working on a new design, the so-called Contracts MVP, which is now essentially feature-complete and on track to make it into the upcoming C++26 Standard.

In this talk, we present the current design of the Contracts MVP targeting C++26. We discuss preconditions, postconditions, assertions, contract-violation handling and much more. We consider how the Contracts MVP provides a superior replacement for custom assertion macros and, when used correctly, can significantly improve the safety and correctness of your code.

Timur Doumler is the co-host of CppCast and an active member of the ISO C++ standard committee, where he is currently co-chair of SG21, the Contracts study group. Timur started his journey into C++ in computational astrophysics, where he was working on cosmological simulations. He then moved into the audio and music technology industry, where he has been working for over a decade and co-founded the music tech startup Cradle. In the past, Timur also worked for JetBrains, first as a developer on CLion's C++ parser and later as a Developer Advocate for C++ developer tools. Currently, Timur lives in Finland, where he is organising the monthly C++ Helsinki meetup. Timur is passionate about clean code, good tools, low latency, and the evolution of the C++ language.