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!