Registration is now open for CppCon 2016 to be held September 18-23, 2016 at the Meydenbauer Center in Bellevue, Washington, 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. Taking place this year in the beautiful Seattle neighborhood and including multiple diverse tracks, the conference will appeal to anyone from C++ novices to experts.

What you can expect at CppCon:

• Pre-conference classes: Choose from six exciting classes:
  • The C++ Core Guidelines with Kate Gregory
  • Concurrent Thinking in C++ with Anthony Williams
  • Crafting Embedded Software in C++ with Dan Saks
  • Modernizing your C++ with Michael Caisse
  • Programming with Qt/Widgets with Giuseppe D’Angelo
  • Using C++ for Low-Latency Systems with Patrice Roy
• Field trip to Living Computer Museum: Join us Sunday afternoon before registration for a chance to meet other attendees and interact with historic hardware.
• 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.
• Presentations by the C++ community: What do embedded systems, game development, high frequency trading, and particle accelerators have in common? C++, of course! Expect talks from a broad range of domains 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.
• Evening events and “unconference” time: Relax, socialize, or start an impromptu coding session.

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.

One of the big surprises last year at CppCon was the tremendous response to the lightning talks. People kept submitting them, and we just kept adding sessions. This year, we’re adding those sessions in advance as the submissions come in, so that you can plan to attend. (And yes, you can still submit a talk. We have time slots we can hold more lightning talk sessions in.) We’ve just added two more sessions – Tuesday lunch and Wednesday morning – to accommodate the submissions already received. You’ll see the lightning talk sessions in yellow on the program. The abstract is vague, and it’s not going to get less vague. You don’t know precisely what you’re going to get until you show up.

What roughly will you get? A number of different talks – some funny, some very technical, some personal, some inspirational, some that will make your grateful you have the job you do and not the speaker’s job. Some will be 5 minutes long and some 15 minutes long. A few might be followups to something that’s already happened. Others might be a way to invite you to something that hasn’t happened yet. Some will be the very first public speaking that speaker has ever done, and some will be a chance to let your hair down with a speaker you’ve seen being serious many times before. Some might not interest you, but that’s ok – they’re short, you can be bored for 5 or 15 minutes, and then there will be a different one. They’re little bite size goodies, and for many of us they were a very enjoyable highlight of the conference. Add some to your schedule now, and be prepared to get up a little early or stay on site a little late to get the full benefit of your time here!

Last year’s CppCon brought together ISO Standard Committee members and game developers to discuss how standard C++ could evolve to better support C++. This resulted in the formation of Study Group 14: Game Dev and Low Latency at the ISO meeting in Lenexa this spring. The SG14 charter is “improving C++ for Low Latency, real time requirements, and performance/efficiency especially for Games, Financial/Banking, and Simulations.”

Some papers have already been discussed by the Study Group, but the first formal meeting of SG14 will be hosted by CppCon this year on Wednesday, September 23rd. This one-day meeting is open to anyone interested, but requires a separate registration (it isn’t covered by a regular conference registration). A second meeting is already set up on March 14-18 2016 at GDC 2015 hosted by Sony (thank you, Sony). The meeting will be run by Michael Wong, the SG14 chair.

For more information on SG14, the meeting, and how best to register for it, please read Michael’s blog post about it.

We are announcing the second keynote for next month’s conference.

Sean Parent, principal scientist at Adobe, will be continuing his “Better Code” keynote series from last year’s C++Now keynote (on complete types) with “Better Code: Data Structures.”

Abstract: The standard library containers are often both misused and underused. Instead of creating new containers, applications are often structured with incidental data structures composed of objects referencing other object. This talk looks at some of the ways the standard containers can be better utilized and how creating (or using non-standard library) containers can greatly simplify code. The goal is no incidental data structures.

Speakers bio: Sean Parent is a principal scientist and software architect for Adobe’s mobile digital imaging group. Sean has been at Adobe since 1993 when he joined as a senior engineer working on Photoshop and later managed Adobe’s Software Technology Lab. In 2009 Sean spent a year at Google working on Chrome OS before returning to Adobe. From 1988 through 1993 Sean worked at Apple, where he was part of the system software team that developed the technologies allowing Apple’s successful transition to PowerPC.

Most of this fall’s program is already online, but we are still working on it. Today we are announcing three new sessions and a panel.

Herb Sutter will be presenting “Writing Good C++14 By Default.” Herb’s session will build on Bjarne Stroustrup’s keynote of the previous day on “Writing Good C++14.”

Chandler Carruth, C++ Language and Compiler Lead at Google, will be presenting “Tuning C++: Benchmarks, and Compilers, and CPUs! Oh My!”

Sumant Tambe will be presenting “Reactive Stream Processing in Industrial IoT using DDS and Rx.cpp,” which includes a live demo of a distributed complex event processing system for Internet of Things.

Our Monday evening panel will be “Grill the Committee,” featuring the opportunity for audience members to question members of the ISO C++ committee. We’ve not yet identified the panel members, but last year’s panel featured a dozen committee members and we’ll have a similar panel this year.