CppCon 2021 Online Keynote: Six Impossible Things by Kevlin Henney

We’ve previously announced keynotes by Bjarne Stroustrup, Herb Sutter, Lisa Lippincott, Michael Caisse, and Sean Parent. This is the last of our six conference keynotes to be announced...

A (Short) Tour of C++ Modules

Thursday, October 28 • 10:30am - 11:30am

by Daniela Engert

Modules are probably the most impactful and most transformative recent major addition to the C++ language. From a user perspective, Modules are conceptually simple and the idea is easy to grasp. And with the C++20 ecosystem maturing, using Modules and adopting them into every-day programming is both feasable and advantageous.

But what is the motivation that lead to the invention of Modules and their inclusion into the standard? How do they look like? Which are the three key features of C++ Modules that exist since the inception of the language, that are mostly irrelevant in the typical usage of 'classical' C++ such that hardly any programmer needs to know much about them but a Modules developer does? What surprises might lie on the path of transforming a classical library into a Module? Are there still any issues, loose ends or open questions regarding Modules?

The talk will try to give a comprehensive answer to those questions. The audience shall get enough information to decide when the right time has come for them to take the plunge and move their codebase to Modules wherever it is advantageous.

CppCon 2021 Keynote: Warning: std::find() is Broken! by Sean Parent Live, In Person

We’ve previously announced keynotes by Bjarne Stroustrup, Herb Sutter, Lisa Lippincott and Michael Caisse. This is the fifth of our six conference keynotes to be announced...

Call for Papers

by the ACCU

The ACCU 2022 conference will be from 2022-04-06 to 2022-04-09, with a pre-conference workshops on 2022-04-05.

The ACCU 2022 will be a hybrit event.

Historically, ACCU has a lot of C++ and C content, and is proud of that: ACCU is the foremost annual conference for people interested in C++ and C, at least in and around the UK. But it is not just a C++ and C conference, ACCU is about programming in whatever language people are using, with whatever tools and processes people are using: D, Chapel, Java, Kotlin, C#, F#, Groovy, Rust, Go, Python, Ruby, Lisp, to name just a few programming languages about which there have been sessions at ACCU conferences. Git, Mercurial, CMake, Meson, TDD, BDD, allthese tools and techniques have been the focus of sessions at ACCU. The ACCU Conference is looking for sessions that will be interesting to people who create software.
The ACCU Conference is put on by ACCU (https://accu.org), but is open to anyone who wishes to be there either as a presenter or an attender.

The Call for Papers lasts for about 3 weeks and will close on Friday 5th November 2021 at 23:59:59 GMT.

Highlighting two events next week

by Jens Weller

The two events will be on Wednesday and Thursday evening (CEST/Berlin):

• The Meeting C++ online book & tool fair
• The monthly meeting with Andreas Reischuck speaking about Using C++20 Coroutines for Asynchronous Parsers.

C++20’s ＜chrono＞ Calendars and Time Zones in MSVC

Thursday, October 28 • 10:30am - 11:30am

by Miya Natsuhara

The ＜chrono＞ header has existed since C++11, but C++20 dramatically increased its capabilities. MSVC has completed this C++20 feature and this session will focus on the development of our implementation and Windows-specific considerations that we encountered. For instance, how do we know if a given point in time is during a leap second insertion? Where do we get the data for time zones? If you are excited by these new chrono features and want to support a Windows platform, come and learn about its developments and caveats for a Windows implementation!

We will also touch on how STL maintainers and our valued external contributors developed the new features collaboratively. If you’re interested in participating in our open-source repo by reporting issues, contributing to discussions, or submitting pull requests, we hope that hearing about an example of collaboration will encourage you to visit our repo in the future.

From Problem to Coroutine: Reducing I/O Latency

Wednesday, October 27 • 10:30am - 11:30am

by Cheinan Marks

Coroutines are now officially part of the C++20 standard and one of their advertised uses is reducing I/O latency. Almost all of the literature on coroutines that I found illustrated either synchronous generators or described the nitty gritty details of coroutines using very simple usages. The best talk I found was Gor Nishanov's excellent talk from CppCon 2018, "Nanocoroutines to the Rescue!" (go watch it!) which solves a different problem than mine, but mostly illustrates the power of coroutines.

In this talk I want to approach coroutines from another direction. I will start with the problem, which almost all engineers face in some form, that of reducing I/O latency while searching and gathering data from a sequential file. Instead of going into the details of how the coroutines work, I will start with the naive synchronous solution and build up coroutines step by step to try and reduce latency, illustrating the pieces as they are added.

Finally I will compare this solution to an old-fashioned solution using threads and we'll see how the coroutines performance measures up and whether all the additional boilerplate needed is worth the additional trouble. I hope discussing the value of coroutines and future proposals for RAII and executors will spark a good discussion with the audience.

CppCon 2021 Keynote: Small Inspiration -- Michael Caisse

We’ve previously announced keynotes by Bjarne Stroustrup, Herb Sutter, and Lisa Lippincott. This is the fourth of our six conference keynotes to be announced.

We’re happy to announce: Michael will be in Aurora live, in person to deliver a brand-new talk about inspiring and being inspired by the embedded world around us.

Michael Caisse started using C++ with embedded systems over 30 years ago. He continues to be passionate about combining his degree in Electrical Engineering with elegant software solutions and is always excited to share his discoveries with others.

Here is his talk description:

Less than 1% of microprocessors sold each year find their way into general purpose computers. Desktops, laptops, and servers of all sizes represent a very small fraction of the compute that surrounds us. We interact with a few of these systems but most go unnoticed. These invisible, unsung embedded devices offer lessons in engineering at all scales and can provide inspiration to seasoned practitioners and future technologists.

Join me as we learn from the embedded world and become inspired to inspire.

This talk is the Keynote talk for the Embedded Track.

Embracing PODs Safely Until They Die

Thursday, October 28 • 10:30am - 11:30am

by Alisdair Meredith and Nina Ranns

How do you change the active member of a union? Can you copy an object without
a publicly callable copy constructor? Can you pass classes having private data to
a function implemented in C? What is the use case for the library type trait
`std::is_trivially_move_assignable`? All these questions and more will be answered
in this session.

PODs --- Plain Old Data --- are neither plain nor old in C++11, and continued to
evolve in every published standard since, until they were finally banished in C++20.
In researching the deconstruction of PODs for the upcoming book, "Embracing
Modern C++ Safely" Alisdair Meredith (and the other authors including John
Lakos, Vittorio Romeo, and Rostislav Khlebnikov) discovered that many of the
intuitive properties and capabilities of trivial and standard layout types did not
behave quite as expected, and there are many subtleties waiting to catch the
unwary. Nina Ranns, as an active member of the Core working group, stepped in
to explain and resolve many concerns, while pointing out further bad assumptions.
Together they will present the use cases, pitfalls, and annoyances of these features
as now properly understood, giving a flavor of the presentation style of each of the
57 C++11/14 features presented in the book.

What You Can Learn from Being Too Cute: Why You Should Write Code That You Should Never Write

Friday, October 29 • 1:30pm - 2:30pm

by Daisy Hollman

During the COVID-19 global pandemic, as we all searched for ways to stay connected to the C++ community, I innocently started posting short, 25-line or less C++ snippets of counterintuitive C++ code that I called my "Cute C++ trick of the day." I was floored by the amount of attention these tweets received, with some being viewed more than 30,000 times and liked or retweeted hundreds of times. I received repeated requests to collect these tricks into a library or talk, and this is that talk.

In this presentation, I will dissect a few of my most popular "Cute C++ tricks" to a level of detail not possible on social media platforms like Twitter. I'll talk about how and why these tricks work the way they do, talk about the dark corners of C++ they touch upon, and talk about what you should actually do if you need to produce the same effect in production code. While not targeted at beginners, these tricks span the gauntlet from features that most intermediate programmers are aware of (but never thought to use in a particular way) to dark corners of the language that many of my C++ committee colleagues were surprised to learn about. Throughout it all runs a common thread: learning how to exploit your own curiosity to expand your toolbox, gain a better grasp of the fundamentals of C++, and ultimately, become a better programmer.