We’ve previously announced keynotes for a very special Language Panel with Bjarne Stroustrup, Guido van Rossum and Mads Torgersen and Bjarne Stroustrup on “Profiles for simplicity and guarantees”.

We’re thrilled to announce our next keynote for CppCon 2026! Laurie Kirk is a researcher at Google specializing in C++, reverse engineering, and deobfuscation. She runs a YouTube channel (@LaurieWired) that covers all sorts of in-depth research topics on programming, reverse engineering, and software optimizations. She has spoken at multiple conferences including RE//verse, ACCU on Sea, DEFCON, Strange Loop, REcon, and more.

From Laurie’s talk description:

The Address is Not The Place: Object Residency in C++26

Random Access Memory is what you buy when you don’t know what your program will do next.

 

Until recently, alternative tiers of memory with vastly different latency characteristics were largely speculative. Then DRAM got expensive. CXL memory pools, far memory, even high bandwidth flash moved from blips to serious contenders. C++ has grown its vocabulary for ownership (smart pointers) and lifetimes (RAII); but intelligent memory tiering, specifically object residency, is a word we don’t natively have.

 

Attempts have been made to solve this issue at an OS-level (Meta’s TPP), or even a compiler/runtime level (OBASE) but they approach the problem transparently by design. And thus…blind by design. You can improve tiered object locality with clever placement within pages, but all these methods are structurally incapable of predicting intent. What if the power was in the developer’s hands?

 

With reflection (P2996) and annotations (P3394), C++26 finally lets us extend the vocabulary ourselves. Game developers have deeply understood smart data grouping for decades, but much of the work is locked behind game engines; not suitable for general application development. [[likely]] and [[unlikely]] hint hot and cold paths, but the future of high-performance development hints at general purpose object residency to tier-aware allocators.

 

This talk introduces an open-source C++26 residency library, demonstrating capabilities against current, and even (simulated) future hardware. The pieces are in place for C++ to create durable abstractions for object residency; with the flexibility to accommodate memory tiers that have not been invented yet!

Registration is open so don’t miss out on CppCon 2026 this September 12-18. Register today!

CppCon 2026 will kick off on Monday, September 14 with Bjarne Stroustrup returning to deliver the opening keynote in Aurora.

Bjarne’s opening keynotes for CppCon are one of the most anticipated and most watched talks in C++. His talks are always among the most viewed presentations on the CppCon YouTube Channel.

From his talk description:

Profiles for simplicity and guarantees

The C++ community is growing fast. C++ is being used in critical applications. C++ can be used in ways that ensures correctness, simplicity, performance, and maintainability. How can we ensure that it is used is such desirable ways? How can we teach new and old C++ developers to do so?

The general strategy is called “subset of superset” and is based on the idea that by extending (“supersetting”) by adding libraries, we can simplify static analysis to where we can remove undesirable uses (“subsetting”) without damaging expressiveness or efficiency. Where run-time checks are necessary, such as to catch out-of-range accesses in hardened libraries, static analysis can be used to minimize the number of checks.

The strategy is supported by the “Profiles” framework, that allows us to require or suppress specific sets of guarantees, called profiles.

As examples, I show how to eliminate uninitialized-object errors and container-invalidation errors (a kind of dangling pointer errors) using the profiles framework and implementations of the “Initialization” and “invalidation” profiles. Both with zero run-time cost.

Be at CppCon again this year as Bjarne Stroustrup flies us above this complex landscape of issues and shines a spotlight on the most important things to know, and to think about, in C++ in 2026. Come to the talk, bring your questions, and don’t miss out!

Registration is now open so don’t miss out on CppCon 2026 this September 12-18. Register today!

The Cppcon 2026 Field Trip will be a visit to Morrison, Colorado – a town on the edge of the Rockies, famous for Red Rocks, the world renown music venue!
No concerts are being held on September 13th, but that is a perfect opportunity to enjoy the scenery, town, and museums that Morrison has to offer, such as the Dinosaur Ridge Museum!

This year’s field trip is sponsored by the North Denver Metro C++ Meetup. Jason Turner, one of the meetup’s organizers, recommends:

If you are arriving for CppCon 2026 by Sunday morning, this is your opportunity to get to know some of your fellow attendees while touring some of the inspiring wonders Colorado has to offer.

See the CppCon 2026 Field Trip page for details.

Register here!

Sponsored by HRT and produced by CultRepo, C++: The Documentary is about to be released worldwide on YouTube on Thursday at 20:00 UTC. Click Notify me on the YouTube Premiere page to get a reminder when it goes live.

Last week, the film’s world premiere event in New York was followed by a live panel discussion with Matt Godbolt (moderator), Bjarne Stroustrup, Gabriel Dos Reis, Nina Ranns, Eric Lubin, and Herb Sutter. That panel was recorded and will be also released in the next few days on the CppCon YouTube channel.