Registration is now open for CppCon 2025! The conference starts on September 13 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 2025!

C++: Some Assembly Required

Friday, September 19 16:15 - 18:00 MDT

by Matt Godbolt

Summary of the talk:

Join Matt in exploring how the C++ ecosystem has evolved through the interplay of intentional design and emergent collaboration. Standards committees craft language features and compiler teams implement them, but something amazing happens in the spaces between: tools appear, communities form, and solutions emerge that nobody quite planned for. What started as individual developers solving their own problems has grown into an interconnected ecosystem that shapes how we all write C++.

From documentation to testing, from build systems to package managers, we'll examine how the C++ community has assembled itself around shared pain points and accidental standards. Using examples and perhaps too many rainforest metaphors, this talk celebrates not just the language we've built, but the organic ecosystem that's grown up around it. Come discover why C++'s greatest strength might be that it's always required some assembly.
Presenters

Matt Godbolt is the creator of the Compiler Explorer website. He is passionate about writing efficient code. He has previously worked at a trading firm, on mobile apps at Google, run his own C++ tools company and spent more than a decade making console games. When he's not hacking on Compiler Explorer, Matt enjoys writing emulators for old 8-bit computer hardware.