We’ve previously announced keynotes by Bjarne Stroustrup on Concept-based Generic Programming, Matt Godbolt on C++ and Assembly Vittorio Romeo on Practical Data-Oriented Design, and by Daisy Hollman on Crafting code.
We’re pleased to announce our final keynote of CppCon 2025! Herb Sutter is renowned C++ expert, author, and speaker, and currently serving as President of the Standard C++ Foundation. He has played a pivotal role in the evolution of modern C++, contributing to language features and concurrency models.
From Herb’s talk description:
Reflection: C++’s Decade-Defining Rocket Engine
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.
Registration is open so don’t miss out on CppCon 2025 this September 14-19. Register today!