As already announced, CppCon 2021 will kick off on Monday, October 25 with Bjarne Stroustrup delivering the opening keynote live in person in Aurora, Colorado, USA.

We’re happy to announce another plenary talk: Herb Sutter will be there live in person to deliver a brand-new talk about post-C++20 C++ language evolution. Here is his talk description:

Extending and Simplifying C++: Pattern Matching using is and as

C++20 is a unique historic milestone: the first edition of Standard C++ that’s “D&E-complete,” with essentially all of the features Bjarne Stroustrup outlined in The Design and Evolution of C++ for C++’s evolution. That doesn’t mean evolution is done, however, and work continues on adding a few more important features in C++23 and beyond, including reflection and pattern matching.

In this talk, I’ll show the C++ pattern matching libraries and language proposals we’ve considered, and present my own contribution that builds on them. My paper has two major aims: (1) to make the syntax clean and regular, and avoid inventing a little sublanguage that works only inside “inspect”; and (2) to make it generalizable so we can use it consistently throughout the language, because matching a pattern is a broadly useful feature that ideally should not be limited to “inspect” only… for example, we would love to express patterns in “if” and “requires” conditions too.

I hope that the most important contribution is that, if we add pattern matching in a way that also provides general “match” and “extract” support throughout the language in the form of generalized “is” constraints and “as” casts, the net result is that we can actually simplify C++… yes, even as we add new features and more expressive power. How can that be simpler? By letting programmers directly express their intent where they have to express it indirectly today, by making the language more regular with fewer special cases to learn, by unifying the syntax of existing standard library features that today have a gaggle of different and divergent styles (e.g., variant, optional), and by providing one general and expressive way to use patterns cleanly throughout C++.

Registration is now open for what will certainly be one of the most memorable CppCons ever this October 24-29. Register today!

Tickets are now available for both online attendees and in-person attendees who are vaccinated, with the goal of opening registration further as we all learn more about what will be safe.

The Main Program for CppCon 2021 is now live!

This year, CppCon is a hybrid format, so we are presenting four tracks for onsite attendees and five tracks for online attendees.

Online attendees will be able to participate in onsite sessions via “simul-cast” for most sessions. A few onsite sessions will be recorded and rebroadcast for online attendees. Rebroadcasted sessions will feature the presenters live in the session chat room and, time allowing, live Q&A at end of the session. (Online attendees will have the ability to view recorded versions of all sessions–onsite and online–shortly after they happen.)

We’ll have over seventy breakout sessions delivered onsite and sixty additional remote sessions by the best C++ presenters in the industry, many returning from previous years as well as some exciting new voices, some of whom are able to present only because we are offering a remote presenting possibility. In addition, we’ll present our traditional onsite plenary session every day and an online opening keynote. We’ve already announced our onsite Opening Keynote and will be announcing our other five headline talks here in coming days.

This year’s Main Program features three special tracks including the Back to Basics Track, the Embedded Track, and the band new Software Design Track.

In addition to the Main Program, we’ll have the panels, lightning talks, Open Content talks, BOFs, exhibitors, social events, and classes that attendees have enjoyed in past years. Note that all but one of our classes have been moved online to allow for greater participation.

Most of the program is published, but we are still working a few surprises, so keep checking back.

We’d like to thank the Program Committee, our speakers, and the many professionals who proposed talks which we, unfortunately, just couldn’t squeeze in this year. Thank you for your hard work and enthusiastic support for this year’s program!

We hope to see you all in less than a month so register now.