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C++: The Documentary trailer

By Blog Staff | May 14, 2026 08:00 AM | Tags: None

Sponsored by HRT and produced by CultRepo, we're pleased to share the official trailer for C++: The Documentary.

The trailer premieres today at 19:00 UTC. Click Notify me on the YouTube Premiere page to get a reminder when it goes live.

The film will have its world premiere on May 28 at a special live event in New York City’s Financial District, followed by a panel discussion that will be recorded for later release. C++: The Documentary will be released worldwide on YouTube on June 4, with the panel recording following a few days later.

CppCon 2025 Crafting the Code You Don’t Write: Sculpting Software in an AI World -- Daisy Hollman

By Blog Staff | May 13, 2026 02:35 PM | Tags: None

Registration is now open for CppCon 2026! The conference starts on September 12 and will be held in person in Aurora, CO. To whet your appetite for this year’s conference, we’re posting videos of some of the top-rated talks from last year's conference. Here’s another CppCon talk video we hope you will enjoy – and why not register today for CppCon 2026!

Crafting the Code You Don’t Write: Sculpting Software in an AI World

by Daisy Hollman

Summary of the talk:

It’s shockingly uncontroversial to say that the fields of developer experience and developer productivity have changed more in the past six months than in the 25 years before that.

As part of the Claude Code team at Anthropic, I’ve had the privilege of witnessing the evolution of agentic coding from proof-of-concept experiments to nearly autonomous software engineers in just six months. In this keynote, I’ll share some of my experiences and learnings from that journey, talk about how LLMs work more generally, attempt some live demonstrations of the latest functionality, explore the future of agentic programming, and tie all of this back to what it means for your workflow as a software engineer.

When I agreed to give this talk earlier this year, there was some portion of the narrative that involved “why you should be using agents to accelerate your development process.” Since then, the world of software engineering has evolved such that the interesting question is no longer “why” but “how.” Like sculptors facing the invention of power tools, or painters around the invention of photography, we now live in a world where vast quantities of rough-draft code can be generated with a very low barrier to entry. How does the role of a software engineer evolve when AI can autonomously implement features from requirements? How do we build safety features into the power tools we’re chiseling away at our codebases with? What aspects of software craftsmanship become more important, not less, in an age of abundant code generation? And critically for the C++ community: how do we leverage these tools where correctness and performance are non-negotiable? The future isn’t about AI replacing programmers, but about a fundamental shift in how we think about software creation. And surprisingly, you might not miss the old way of doing things.

CppCon 2025 Reflection: C++’s Decade-Defining Rocket Engine -- Herb Sutter

By Blog Staff | May 11, 2026 02:32 PM | Tags: None

Reflection: C++’s Decade-Defining Rocket Engine

by Herb Sutter

Summary of the talk:

In June 2025, C++ crossed a Rubicon: it handed us the keys to its own machinery. For the first time, C++ can describe itself—and generate more. The first compile-time reflection features in draft C++26 mark the most transformative turning point in our language’s history by giving us the most powerful new engine for expressing efficient abstractions that C++ has ever had, and we’ll need the next decade to discover what this rocket can do.

This session is a high-velocity tour through what reflection enables today in C++26, and what it will enable next. We’ll start with live compiler demos (Godbolt, of course) to show how much the initial C++26 feature set can already do. Then we’ll jump a few years ahead, using Dan Katz’s Clang extensions and my own cppfront reflection implementation to preview future capabilities that could reshape not just C++, but the way we think about programming itself.

We’ll see how reflection can simplify C++’s future evolution by reducing the need for as many bespoke new language features, since many can now be expressed as reusable compile-time libraries—faster to design, easier to test, and portable from day one. We’ll even glimpse how it might solve a problem that has long eluded the entire software industry, in a way that benefits every language.

The point of this talk isn’t to immediately grok any given technique or example. The takeaway is bigger: to leave all of us dizzy from the sheer volume of different examples, asking again and again, “Wait, we can do that now?!”—to fire up our imaginations to discover and develop this enormous new frontier together, and chart the strange new worlds C++ reflection has just opened for us to explore.

Reflection has arrived, more is coming, and the frontier is open. Let’s go.

CppCon 2025 Back to Basics: Move Semantics -- Ben Saks

By Blog Staff | May 7, 2026 02:30 PM | Tags: None

Back to Basics: Move Semantics

by Ben Saks

Summary of the talk:

While many C++ programmers are familiar with the broad idea of move semantics, even experienced C++ programmers often struggle with the fine details. For example, many programmers are unclear on exactly when an object is considered implicitly movable and when std::move() is required to make the object movable. This is especially unfortunate because using std::move() when it's unnecessary sometimes degrades performance.

This session starts by explaining how move semantics can substantially improve performance for certain types. It then shows how to implement a type with move semantics, and explores some important design issues in creating these types. After that, it explains how types like std::vector＜T＞ can operate much more efficiently on objects of types that support move semantics.

You'll leave this session with a clearer understanding of:

how to implement move-semantic types,

how to take maximum advantage of move-semantic types, and

how move semantics are related to other language features like return-value optimization.

JSON and C++26 compile-time reflection: a talk -- Daniel Lemire

By Blog Staff | May 6, 2026 03:34 PM | Tags: None

The next C++ standard (C++26) is getting exciting new features. One of these features is compile-time reflection. It is ideally suited to serialize and deserialize data at high speed. To test it out, we extended our fast JSON library (simdjson) and we gave a talk at CppCon 2025. The video is out on YouTube.

JSON and C++26 compile-time reflection: a talk

by Daniel Lemire

Watch now:

CppCon 2025 Beyond Sequential Consistency: Unlocking Hidden Performance Gains -- Christopher Fretz

By Blog Staff | May 5, 2026 02:27 PM | Tags: None

Beyond Sequential Consistency: Unlocking Hidden Performance Gains

by Christopher Fretz

Summary of the talk:

In 2011, C++ introduced a formally defined memory model, providing a foundation for portable, multi-threaded code with well-defined correctness guarantees. This was a major milestone, enabling expressive threading primitives and safe concurrency patterns while allowing low-level optimizations for performance.

By default, C++ atomics enforce sequential consistency, which ensures intuitive, predictable behavior. However, these strong guarantees often exceed what’s necessary for correctness and come with a performance cost.

This talk delves into weaker memory orderings, particularly acquire/release and relaxed semantics, using a ring buffer as a practical example of how they can be used. We’ll also examine how the C++ memory model maps to real hardware, focusing on x86’s native guarantees, and comparing against less coherent platforms like ARM. We'll explore how strategic use of weaker synchronization can unlock significant performance gains without sacrificing correctness.

CppCon 2025 The Wonderful World of Designing a USB Stack Using Modern C++ -- Madeline Schneider

By Blog Staff | Apr 27, 2026 02:24 PM | Tags: None

The Wonderful World of Designing a USB Stack Using Modern C++

by Madeline Schneider

Summary of the talk:

Have you ever wondered how to design a library to abstract and manage complex communication protocols like USB? Have you ever wondered which parts of a protocol need to be hardware abstractions and which parts are hardware agnostic? Well you’re in luck, my mentor and I have designed a USB stack from the ground up in modern C++! We found that the public offerings did not meet our needs. Our requirements are:

Resource efficient

Portable

Modular

Convenient to use

Distributable via single pre-built binary using conan

Without allocations after initialization

In this talk you’ll learn the basics of how USB works at the lowest level from a software perspective. You’ll learn why malleability and freedom are so important for USB device development and how C++ makes such a library design easy to implement. Embark with me on a deep-dive into shaping a library where complexity runs wild. This talk will have lessons on library and API design in situations where the degrees of freedom are vast and all parts must magically fit together. By the end, you’ll carry away practical patterns for taming vast design spaces—skills that apply to any ambitious library, far beyond USB.

CppCon 2025 Can Standard C++ Replace CUDA for GPU Acceleration? -- Elmar Westphal

By Blog Staff | Apr 23, 2026 02:22 PM | Tags: None

Can Standard C++ Replace CUDA for GPU Acceleration?

by Elmar Westphal

Summary of the talk:

On top of the woes of multi-threaded programming itself, coding for GPUs used to be about dealing with kernels, separate memory domains, warps, blocks and other strange things. Later, life became easier and you could sprinkle in a bunch of pragmas, hoping that your favorite language extension would deal with all of this for you, and better memory model abstractions came up that were less painful to deal with. In recent years, new drivers (seemingly) levelled the boundaries between memory domains and new compilers allow us to deploy code to the GPU using standard C++ execution policies. The performance of the generated code is often similar to that of its CUDA-C++ counterpart. Of course there is no magic bullet to shoot at your (legacy) code and there are caveats, but come and see how using standard parallelism (also) for programming GPUs makes it a lot easier to write portable and more future-proof high-performance C++ code.

CppCon 2025 C++: Some Assembly Required -- Matt Godbolt

By Blog Staff | Apr 21, 2026 02:12 PM | Tags: None

C++: Some Assembly Required

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.

CppCon 2025 How C++ Finally Beats Rust at JSON Serialization -- Lemire & Thiesen

By Blog Staff | Apr 17, 2026 12:33 PM | Tags: None

How C++ Finally Beats Rust at JSON Serialization

by Daniel Lemire & Francisco Geiman Thiesen

Summary of the talk:

JSON, or JavaScript Object Notation, has become a cornerstone for storing and exchanging data. Its appeal lies in its simplicity—human-readable text that elegantly captures structured data through attribute-value pairs and arrays: {"age": 5, "name": "Daniel", "toys": ["wooden dog", "little car"]}. JSON is intuitive yet powerful. But ingesting and producing JSON can turn into a performance choke point. In C++, it can be a tedious, error-prone task. Programmers wrestle with unexpected content, manually mapping data to and from native structures, all while striving for speed and safety.

With languages like Java, C#, Zig, Rust, or Python, JSON serialization and deserialization typically requires far less work. In particular, Rust's serde library blends convenience with high speed. We wish for a C++ library to automatically handle JSON production and consumption, seamlessly tied to native data structures. It is not merely to simplify life for developers; it is also about crafting code that is both fast and solid, generated at compile time by a battle-tested library.

Thankfully, C++ might soon be getting reflective metaprogramming ( PR2996 ). Leveraging the experimental Bloomberg LLVM fork with reflective metaprogramming, we have built a full-fledged implementation—complete with tests, benchmarks, and documentation. Our goal is to have production-ready code the moment mainstream compilers catch up. The results speak for themselves: we are parsing JSON directly into C++ structures at gigabytes per second, outpacing even mature heavyweights like Rust's serde. Better yet, the conversion between C++ data structures and JSON is fully automated, thanks to metaprogramming. It has the potential to be a leap forward for C++ in the data-driven age. Unfortunately, there are still problems and limitations: we present them and provide some solutions.