Matt Godbolt‘s closing plenary is entitled, What Has My Compiler Done for Me Lately? Unbolting the Compiler’s Lid The abstract gives a history of the project that has made Godbolt a verb:

In 2012, Matt and a colleague were arguing whether it was efficient to use the then-new-fangled range for. During the discussion a bash script was written to quickly compile C++ source and dump the assembly. Five years later and that script has grown into a website relied on by many to quickly see the code their compiler emits, to compare different compilers’ code generation and behaviour, to quickly prototype and share code, and investigate the effect of optimization flags.

In this talk Matt will not only show you how easy (and fun!) it is to understand the assembly code generated by your compiler, but also how important it can be. He’ll explain how he uses Compiler Explorer in his day job programming low-latency trading systems, and show some real-world examples. He’ll demystify assembly code and give you the tools to understand and appreciate how hard your compiler works for you.

He’ll also talk a little about how Compiler Explorer works behind the scenes, how it is maintained and deployed, and  share some stories about how it has changed over the years. By the end of this session you’ll be itching to take your favourite code snippets and start exploring what your compiler does with them.

If you’d like to thank Matt in person for Compiler Explorer, there is still time to register (but not much).

Lars Knoll‘s plenary is entitled, Qt as a C++ Framework: History, Present State and Future.

This address is a good overview for those that are new to Qt and offers a look into the future for those that are using Qt now. From the abstract:

Qt is one of the largest and most widely used C++ frameworks. It is fully cross-platform, covering all functionality required to develop advanced graphical applications. The talk will go through important parts of Qt’s history from it’s roots to what it is today. We will have a look into the relation between Qt and C++, some of the design philosophies driving the evolution of Qt. I’ll go through the current state of the frameworks, latest releases, ongoing development focus, and give an outlook into the future.

This is a valuable opportunity to get an insider’s understanding of one of the most successful frameworks in C++.

Herb Sutter‘s plenary is entitled, Meta: Thoughts on generative C++. As he tells us:

Two years ago, I started to focus on exploring ways that we might evolve the C++ language itself to make C++ programming both more powerful and simpler. The only way to accomplish both of those goals at the same time is by adding abstractions that let programmers directly express their intent—to elevate comments and documentation to testable code, and elevate coding patterns and idioms into compiler-checkable declarations. The work came up with several potential candidate features where judiciously adding some power to the language could simplify code dramatically, while staying true to C++’s core values of efficient abstraction, closeness to hardware, and the zero-overhead principle. 

The first two potential candidate features from that work to be further developed and proposed for ISO C++ are the <=> unified comparison operator (minor) and what I’ve provisionally called “metaclasses” as a way to generatively write C++ types (major). This talk is about the latter, and includes design motivation, current progress, and some live online compiler demos using the prototype Clang-based compiler built by Andrew Sutton and hosted at godbolt.org.

This presentation is an expansion of the Thoughts on Metaclasses session, presented at ACCU this past April. Due to the overwhelming positive response the presentation generated, Herb will expand the scope and focus on the implications of Metaclasses that it will bring to future progress of the C++ language. The concept is a groundbreaking change in C++ development and is a session not to be missed.