CppCon 2019 Call for Submissions

CppCon is the annual, week-long face-to-face gathering for the entire C++ community. The conference is organized by the C++ community for the community and so we invite you to present. The conference regular program consists of five days of seven tracks of one hour sessions.

Have you learned something interesting about C++, maybe a new technique possible in C++14/17/20? Or perhaps you have implemented something cool related to C++, maybe a new C++ library? If so, consider sharing it with other C++ enthusiasts by giving a regular program talk at CppCon 2019.

The submissions deadline is May 20 with decisions sent by July 8.

For topic ideas, possible formats, submission instructions and valuable advice on how to make the best possible submission, see the Submissions page.

Note: Calls for lightning talks and Open Content sessions will be made this summer. The deadline for these is the conference itself.

Registration for CppCon 2019 is Open

Registration is now open for CppCon 2019 to be held September 15-20, 2019 at the Gaylord Rockies in Aurora, Colorado, USA.

CppCon is the annual, week-long face-to-face gathering for the entire C++ community. The conference is organized by the C++ community for the community. You will enjoy inspirational talks and a friendly atmosphere designed to help attendees learn from each other, meet interesting people, and generally have a stimulating experience.

This year, the conference is taking place at our new home at the Gaylord Rockies Hotel and Convention Center in Aurora, Colorado, very near Denver International Airport. The venue is brand new and we’ll have lots more space, but we’ll still have all the events which you’ve come to know and love, including multiple diverse tracks. The conference will appeal to anyone from C++ novices to experts.

2018 attendees

What you can expect at CppCon:

Scott at the Bookstore

  • Invited talks and panels: Expect a week full of insight from some of the world’s leading experts in C++. Still have questions? Ask them at one of CppCon’s panels featuring those at the cutting edge of the language, such as the Grill the Committee panel, where you’ll be able to ask questions of ISO Standard C++ Committee members.
  • Presentations by the C++ community: What do embedded systems, game development, high frequency trading, motion picture graphics, the defense and aerospace industries, and particle accelerators have in common? C++, of course! Expect talks from a broad range of domain experts focused on practical C++ techniques, libraries, and tools.
  • Lightning talks: Get informed at a fast pace during special sessions of short, less formal talks. Never presented at a conference before? This is your chance to share your thoughts on a C++-related topic in an informal setting.
  • Poster Competition: Enjoy the insights on display and vote on your favorite posters. Or share your insights and enjoy competing.
  • Exhibitors and Tool time: Have a question or interest about a particular tool? Have one-on-one conversations with tool experts.
  • Field Trip: This year’s trip is to world famous Casa Bonita Mexican restaurant and to an “all you can eat” video arcade.
  • Student Program: We support full-time students with special registration, content, and social activities.
  • Evening events, dinners, and “un-conference” time: Relax, socialize with speakers and other attendees, or start an impromptu coding session.

Meet the Speakers Banquet 2018

CppCon’s goal is to encourage the best use of C++ while preserving the diversity of viewpoints and experiences. The conference is a project of the Standard C++ Foundation, a not-for-profit organization whose purpose is to support the C++ software developer community and promote the understanding and use of modern, standard C++ on all compilers and platforms.

Call for Proposals for CppCon 2019 Classes

The conference is asking for instructors to submit proposals for pre- and post-conferences classes to be taught in conjunction with next September’s CppCon 2019.

If you are interested in teaching such a class, please contact us at info@cppcon.org and we’ll send you an instructors’ prospectus and address any questions that you might have. The deadline for submitting proposals is December 21st, 2018.

Call for Open Content Sessions

As we do every year, we offer Open Content session in the early morning, over lunch, and in the evening.

Audience8

Open Content is just that, open! Attendees and regular program speakers alike can propose sessions on anything that interests them. These might feature a single facilitator leading a room through an exercise, activity or demo, a panel of 3-5 people taking questions from the room, a “hackathon” on a specific project, or an open conversation among the whole room. The projector is available for slides or public note taking.

Open Content is designed for flexibility so that a “Birds of a Feather” talk may be proposed even after the conference has begun. A speaker who gets a lot of post-talk questions may agree to host a Q&A session in the Open Content time. An attendee inspired by a session may host a session to explore a topic further or start on a group implementation of something.

Anyone can submit an open content session, you don’t need to be a conference speaker (or even a registered attendee). To submit, visit our Open Content Submissions page.

These sessions will be open in another way too – Open Content does not require conference registration. That’s right, everyone who is in the area is welcome to come and join us for all the early morning/lunch/evening sessions, including proposing or leading a session. This is part of our goal to be an inclusive conference for the entire C++ community.

Free Friday

All CppCon 2018 events on Friday, September 28th, do not require conference registration. That’s right, just like all our evening sessions (except the Registration Reception and the dinner), all Friday sessions are open to the public without a conference registration. This includes talks by some of our popular speakers.

Cougar Mountain Zoo Field Trip Announced

cougars at Cougar Mountain ZooJoin us at the Zoo!

The CppCon 2018 Field Trip will be to Cougar Mountain Zoo.

Spend a gorgeous Sunday afternoon on September 23rd, with other CppCon attendees, at Cougar Mountain Zoo. The zoo is filled with wild and exotic animals and is located in the mountains near the friendly and historic city of Issaquah.

The zoo is primarily focused on endangered species and education. Many of the animals have been born or raised in-house and have a self assured attitude around humans, enabling visitors to take deep glimpse into the beauty and mysteries of these beautiful creatures.

The trip includes a guided tour, which last for about 60 minutes and is designed to introduce the group to the immense beauty and mysteries of the Earth’s vanishing wildlife.

See  the CppCon 2018 Field Trip page for detail.

Cougar Mountain Zoo

CppCon 2018 Program Available

Kate GregoryThe program for CppCon 2018 is now live!

We’ll have over 100 regular sessions delivered by the best C++ presenters in the industry, many returning from previous years as well as some exciting new voices. We’ll have six or seven concurrent tracks full of sessions containing C++ best practices and what you need to know about C++17 and even what is planned for C++20.

In addition to the main program, we’ll have panels, lightning talks, Open Content talks, BOFs, author signings, exhibitors, standards committee meetings, community social events, workshops, classes, and some awesome headline speakers. Watch the attendee video from last year to get a hint of what you’ll see this year.

Our closing panel, moderated by Matt Godbolt of Compiler Explorer, will feature representatives from Google, Microsoft, and Red Hat discussing the Spectre vulnerability and how the industry is addressing it.

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!

2018 is a great year for C++! Register here to join in Bellevue and discover why!

Early Bird Registration Ends this Weekend

No matter when you register for CppCon 2018, you be able to :

  • Meet with
    • over a thousand other professional C++ engineers, including
      • book, blog, and library authors,
      • standards committee members,
      • compiler and other tool implementers, and
      • teachers and trainers
    • scores of the best presenters in the industry, and
    • exhibitors from all over the world
  • Attend
    • five days of six or seven tracks of peer-reviewed presentations,
    • daily plenary talks from recognized industry leaders,
    • multiple lightning talk sessions,
    • expert panels and special sessions,
    • poster presentations, and
    • social events.

But if you do it by this weekend, you save more than enough money to treat yourself to the Meet the Speakers Dinner.

To help you decide, here, for the first time, is this year’s promo video:

If you recognize someone you know, let them know that you’ll see them in September.

CppCon 2018 Plenary: Patterns and Techniques Used in the Houdini 3D Graphics Application by Mark Elendt

Early Bird registration is almost at an end. Only three days (one US business days) remain before the deadline.

Plenary Speaker: Mark Elendt

Mark ElendtAcademy award-winner, Mark Elendt will be giving his first CppCon talk on Patterns and Techniques Used in the Houdini 3D Graphics Application.

Mark has been working at SideFX, the creators of Houdini for over 25 years and it was in recognition of this work and the value of Houdini to the motion picture industry that Mark and SideFX Software were given a Scientific and Technical Academy Award of Merit earlier this year.

From his talk’s description:

Not only has Houdini been used in all of the Visual Effects Academy Award winning films of the past 10 years, but it has also been used for television shows like Game of Thrones and Stranger Things as well as content creation for many AAA video games, and even for scientific visualization. 

Houdini artists are tasked with creating amazing, never before seen visual effects. They constantly push both performance and scale in the software. Since the early 1990’s Houdini’s C++ architecture has provided a flexible platform that has enabled artists from around the world to 
create their vision. 

Mark will discuss some of the patterns and approaches that have been used in Houdini to meet the demands of production, from the early days of dealing with c-front to embracing modern features provided by modern C++. 

CppCon 2018 Keynote: Simplicity: Not Just for Beginners by Kate Gregory

Don’t miss out on Early Bird registration. Only five days (two US business days) remain before the deadline.

Keynote Speaker: Kate Gregory

Kate GregoryKate Gregory is an author, sought-after conference speaker, trainer, Microsoft Regional Director, and partner at Gregory Consulting. She is also a frequent and popular speaker at CppCon and this year she be giving her first CppCon keynote address.

In her keynote, Simplicity: Not Just for Beginners, she will address the question, Why do so many people say that simple code is better code, but so few put it into practice?

From her talk’s description:

In this talk I’ll spend a little time on why simpler is better, and why we resist simplicity. Then I’ll provide some specific approaches that are likely to make your code simpler, and discuss what you need to know and do in order to consistently write simpler code and reap the benefits of that simplicity.

CppCon 2018 Plenary: Spectre: Secrets, Side-Channels, Sandboxes, and Security by Chandler Carruth

Chandler CarruthLess than a week remains for Early Bird registration. Only six days (three US business days) remain before the deadline.

Plenary Speaker: Chandler Carruth

Chandler, who leads the C++ and LLVM teams at Google and is one of the most popular speakers at CppCon, will tackle the new class of vulnerabilities in modern CPUs with his talk Spectre: Secrets, Side-Channels, Sandboxes, and Security. He is one of the lead engineers within Google and across the industry working to respond to these developments.

From his talk’s description:

The discovery of speculative execution side-channel attacks (called “Spectre”) fundamentally changes the security model of every modern superscalar microprocessor. Extracting secret data (credit cards, cryptographic keys) through side-channels is not new and has challenged the cryptographic community for decades. However, speculative execution attack techniques have fundamentally altered the ease and applicability of side-channels: far more code is impacted by these attacks and they can more reliably be weaponized. Responding to these issues has impacted CPU design, compiler design, library design, sandbox techniques and even the C++ programming language and standard.

This talk will explain how these kinds of attacks work at a high level and provide a clear set of terminology to describe these classes of vulnerabilities and attacks. It will show how the different variants work at the low level of modern hardware to give a detailed and precise understanding of the mechanics involved on CPUs today.

In addition to his plenary address, Chandler will participate in a panel discussion with other experts from across the industry who have helped lead this security incident response.