Continuing with the program preview, the next set of accepted talks is below (summary first, abstracts following):

Andrei Alexandrescu: “Mo’ Hustle Mo’ Problems”
Andrew Sutton: “Generic Programming with Concepts Lite”
Marshall Clow: “Hardening Your Code”
Nate Kohl: “cppreference.com: Documenting C++ One Edit at a Time”
Kate Gregory, James McNellis: “Modernizing Legacy C++ Code”

Andrei Alexandrescu: “Mo’ Hustle Mo’ Problems“

Reasonably-written C++ code will be naturally fast. This is due to C++’s excellent low-penalty abstractions and a memory model close to the machine. However, a large category of applications have no boundaries on desired speed, meaning there’s no point of diminishing returns in making code faster. Better speed means less power consumed for the same work, more workload with the same data center expense, better features for the end user, more features for machine learning, better analytics, and more. Optimizing has always been an art, and in particular optimizing C++ on contemporary hardware has become a task of formidable complexity. This is because modern hardware has a few peculiarities about it that are not sufficiently understood and explored. This talk discusses a few such effects, and guides the attendee on how to navigate design and implementation options in search for better performance.

Speaker’s bio: Andrei Alexandrescu is a researcher, software engineer, and author. He wrote three best-selling books on programming (Modern C++ Design, C++ Coding Standards, and The D Programming Language) and numerous articles and papers on wide-ranging topics from programming to language design to Machine Learning to Natural Language Processing. Andrei holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Washington and a BS in Electrical Engineering from University “Politehnica” Bucharest. He works as a Research Scientist for Facebook.

Andrew Sutton: “Generic Programming with Concepts Lite“

In this talk, I will give an overview of the Concepts Lite language extension for C++ and present examples of its use in design and implementation of real-world generic libraries. Concepts Lite provides the ability for programmers to directly state constraints on template arguments as part of the template declaration. These constraints are predicates which determine whether or not a template argument can be used with that template. Constraints are checked by the compiler at the point of use, meaning that that effectively constrained generic libraries will not suffer from the usual problems of insane diagnostics. Libraries written using concepts will be far more readable and maintainable than the status quo. This talk will focus on generic programming, proposed language features, and their use in building real-world libraries. Concepts Lite is a forthcoming ISO Technical Specification (TS) aimed at publication alongside C++14. Concepts Lite is implemented in a branch of GCC, which will be made available to the audience for experiments and experience.

Speaker’s bio: Andrew Sutton is an assistant professor at the University of Akron in Ohio where he teaches and conducts research at the intersection of Software Engineering and Programming Languages. Dr. Sutton helped design and implemented the Concepts Lite proposal for the C++ programming language. He is also the author of the Origin C++ Libraries, an experimental collection of generic libraries that supports ideas and research for generic programming. Dr. Sutton had previously worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Texas A&M University where he worked with Bjarne Stroustrup and Gabriel Dos Reis on the design and implementation of language support for generic programming (i.e., Concepts Lite). He is a member of the C++ Standards Committee and Project Editor for the Concepts Lite Technical Specification. He graduated with a PhD in computer science from Kent State University in Ohio in 2010.

Marshall Clow: “Hardening Your Code“

Ok, you’ve written some code, and it seems to work. How can you be sure that it works? It’s a busy, complicated, dangerous world out there, and software has to work in lots of different environments. How can you gain confidence about your code? How can you make your code more reliable? There are a lot of techniques available to developers today; I’ll talk about several of them: Unit tests, static analysis, runtime analysis, fuzzing, decoding compiler warnings and probably others.

Speaker’s bio: Marshall is a long-time Boost participant. He is one of the moderators of the Boost-Users mailing list, and helps keep the Trac system running. Marshall is a principal engineer at Qualcomm, Inc. in San Diego. He is the author of the Boost.Algorithm library, maintains Boost.Array and Boost.StringAlgo, and is the leader of the Boost Community Maintenance team.

Nate Kohl: “cppreference.com: Documenting C++ One Edit at a Time“

How do you convert hundreds of pages of C++ standardese into a resource that is accessible to software engineers around the world? This talk will describe the process of building a community-run website that documents all of the nooks and dark corners of the C++ programming language. I’ll look back at the history of how C++ was defined, cover the current state of documentation, examine the pros and cons of running a fairly high-profile publicly-editable wiki, and try to guess at what the future holds.

Speaker’s bio: Nate Kohl is a software engineer at Google who enjoys herding cats.

Kate Gregory, James McNellis: “Modernizing Legacy C++ Code“

C++ is a programming language with a long, storied history spanning over three decades–four if one includes its C ancestry. The C++ language has undergone many changes during that time, compiler technology has advanced substantially, and computers today are very different from the computers of decades past. But despite all of these advances, there’s an awful lot of C++ code in use today that looks like it was written in the 1980s. In C++ some cases, the code was written in the 1980s and it’s still in use; in other cases, it’s recently-written code that just doesn’t use modern style. In this talk, we’ll discuss some of the problems with legacy code, and review some practical techniques for applying principles of modern C++ to gradually improve the quality of legacy code and improve maintainability and debuggability. We’ll show how some very small changes to code can yield huge benefits.

Speakers’ bio: Kate Gregory has been using C++ since before Microsoft had a C++ compiler. She writes, mentors, codes, and leads projects, in both C++ and .NET, especially for Windows 7 and 8. Kate is a Microsoft Regional Director, a Visual C++ MVP, and has written over a dozen books (the most recent on C++ AMP for Microsoft Press) and speaks at conferences and user groups around the world. Kate develops courses on C++, Visual Studio, and Windows programming for Pluralsight, founded the East of Toronto .NET Users group, and is a member of adjunct faculty at Trent University in Peterborough.

James McNellis is a senior engineer on the Microsoft Visual C++ team, where he is responsible for the Visual C++ C Runtime (CRT) and C Standard Library implementation. He was previously a member of the Microsoft Expression Blend team, developing the XAML designer tools for Windows 8 apps. Prior to joining Microsoft in 2010, he spent several years working on real-time 3-D simulation and robotics projects in the defense industry. James is a prolific contributor on the Stack Overflow programming Q&A website and occasionally writes for the Visual C++ Team Blog.

Good news: due to the large number of submissions (we got over 140), the conference will have 6 tracks instead of the planned 5. This means there will be approximately 100 talks, and that’s not counting keynotes, plenary sessions, and lightning talks (more on those soon). As far as we know no other conference has ever had this number of C++-related presentations which will make CppCon 2014 the biggest event in the history of the language.

Understandably, many of you would like to see the conference program before registering. However, due to a greater than expected number of submissions, the final program is still some weeks away. So to help you make up your mind (or convince your boss) we are going to start publishing the talks as they are accepted. So here is the first chunk (summary first, abstracts following):

Scott Meyers: “Type Deduction and Why You Care”
John JT Thomas: “Embarcadero Case Study: Bringing CLANG/LLVM to Windows”
Rachel Cheng, Michael VanLoon: “Boost: A Bridge from C++98 to C++11; An Introduction to Using More Boost”
Titus Winters: “The Philosophy of Google’s C++ Code”
James McNellis: “Unicode in C++”

Scott Meyers: “Type Deduction and Why You Care“

C++98 had template type deduction, and it worked so intuitively, there was little need to understand what took place under the covers. C++11 extends type deduction to include universal references, applies it to auto variables and lambda expressions, then throws in a special auto-only deduction rule. C++14 pushes the boundary further, adding two forms of function return type deduction (auto and decltype(auto)) for arbitrary functions and offering auto parameters for lambdas. The result is that what could be treated as a black box in C++98 has become a topic that practicing C++ developers really need to understand. This talk will give you the information you need to do that.

Speaker’s bio: Scott Meyers is one of the world’s foremost experts on C++ software development. He wrote the best-selling Effective C++ series (Effective C++, More Effective C++, and Effective STL) and is also author of Overview of the New C++ (C++11/14) and Effective C++ in an Embedded Environment.

John JT Thomas: “Embarcadero Case Study: Bringing CLANG/LLVM to Windows“

CLANG/LLVM delivers a highly conforming C++ compiler and architecture for targeting multiple CPUs, and, as such, has seen success in iOS and other operating systems. Embarcadero has successfully delivered the first commercial compiler for Windows based on CLANG/LLVM. This session describes the benefits of CLANG/LLVM as well as the challenges in bringing it to the Windows operating system. Particular emphasis is placed on the managing the changes in CLANG as well as the additional features added to enable Windows development.

Speaker’s bio: John “JT” Thomas, Director of Product Management at Embarcadero Technologies, has more than 15 years of product management and product development experience including hands-on experience with the early versions of Delphi and C++Builder at Borland Software. While at Borland he was a delegate on the ANSI/ISO C++ standards committee. He earned his Computer Science degree from University of California, Santa Cruz and his MBA and MSE from San Jose State University.

Rachel Cheng and Michael VanLoon: “Boost: A Bridge from C++98 to C++11; An Introduction to Using More Boost“

Part one is for those who are stuck with a C++98/03 compiler, but are interested in using more advanced C++11-like strategies. We will discuss some of the differences between C++98 and C++11 while demonstrating how strategic use of Boost libraries can bridge the gap, allowing more modern programming paradigms in many cases.  Part two is a deeper dive into some interesting Boost libraries for those who may be new to Boost usage. We will explore how C++98 and C++11 can be enhanced and extended by the additional richness of Boost libraries. We will use as example some of the boost libraries used in the F5 Networks code base. If there is time leftover, we will discuss our experience upgrading GCC.

Speakers’ bio: Rachel Cheng is a recent graduate from The Evergreen State College is currently employed at F5 Networks. Michael VanLoon is a Senior Software Engineer at F5 Networks, is a member of the Northwest C++ Users group, and has attended ISO C++ Standards Committee meetings. He has benefited from time at Microsoft, Yahoo!, and VMware, among others, before joining F5. He is fascinated with crafting code and is dismayed at code that falls short of its potential.

Titus Winters: “The Philosophy of Google’s C++ Code“

The Google C++ Style Guide is a fairly popular guide for C++ coding practices, both at Google and externally, but some of its recommendations often seem dated and have created controversy and perceived tension with more modern C++ In this talk we will focus on the core philosophies underlying that guide, ranging from the common (be consistent) to the unusual (leave an explicit trace for the reader), and debunk the idea that Google’s C++ is anything less than modern. We’ll discuss how these core ideas inform contentious rules like “No non-const references” and “Don’t use exceptions,” and how the application of those rules has worked for us in practice, both as developers and reliability engineers (SREs).

Speaker’s bio: Titus Winters has spent the past three years working on Google’s core C++ libraries. He’s particularly interested in issues of large scale software engineering and codebase maintenance: how do we keep a codebase of over 100M lines of code consistent and flexible for the next decade? Along the way he has helped Google teams pioneer techniques to perform automated code transformations on a massive scale, and helps maintain the Google C++ Style Guide.

James McNellis: “Unicode in C++“

In some programming languages, text processing is easy. Unfortunately, C++ is not one of those languages. C++ lacks good, built-in support for Unicode, though the situation is starting to improve. This session will begin with a brief overview of text encodings, and an introduction to Unicode and the various Unicode encodings. We’ll look at the woeful state of Unicode support in C++98 (or, really, lack thereof), then take a look at the improvements that were made in C++11 and other improvements that have recently been proposed for standardization. We’ll finish up with a discussion of several libraries designed to make it easier to work with Unicode in C++, including the widely-used, open-source International Components for Unicode (ICU) library.

Speaker’s bio: James McNellis is a senior engineer on the Microsoft Visual C++ team, where he is responsible for the Visual C++ C Runtime (CRT) and C Standard Library implementation. He was previously a member of the Microsoft Expression Blend team, developing the XAML designer tools for Windows 8 apps. Prior to joining Microsoft in 2010, he spent several years working on real-time 3-D simulation and robotics projects in the defense industry. James is a prolific contributor on the Stack Overflow programming Q&A website and occasionally writes for the Visual C++ Team Blog.

We have received a large number of high quality proposals and while we cannot share the details until the Program Committee has put together the program, we can mention some of the topics that will be covered and names of speakers that will be presenting.

We are seeing submissions that range from new Standards Committee proposals for features and libraries to how to write better and more modern C++ code or make the compiler help you do that. Other topics include developing for mobile platforms, writing reliable and exception-safe code, concurrent and lock-free programming, database access and object persistence, continuous delivery integration, as well as various memory models (shared, user mode virtual, and transactional).

To mention a few names, you can expect to hear from: Alan Uthoff, Andrew Stepanchuk, Boris Kolpackov, Brett Hall, Camille Coti, Edouard Alligand, Eric Niebler, Herb Sutter, Jason Turner, Jens Weller, Joel Falcou, John Farrier, Jon Kalb, Kate Gregory, Marshall Clow, Michael Caisse, Michael Wong, Nate Kohl, Robert Ramey, Roland Bock, Pedro Ramalhete, Peter Sommerlad, Scott Meyers, Sridhar Poduri, Stefanus Du Toit, and Steve Heller.

While we already have some great content, we need more, so don’t forget to submit your proposal before the deadline, May 15. You only have one week left! To make the submission process smoother there is also the new, easier to use submission form.

In the past couple of weeks a lot of C++ enthusiasts have registered for CppCon 2014 and as a result we only have about 20 super early bird entries left. If you are planning to attend, this is your last chance to register at the most affordable price.

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.

Have you learned something interesting about C++, maybe a new technique possible in C++11? 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 talk at CppCon 2014. Submissions deadline is May 15 with decisions sent by June 13. For topic ideas, possible formats, and submission instructions, see the Submissions page.

Opening Keynote by Bjarne Stroustrup
September 7–12, 2014
Bellevue, Washington, USA

Registration is now open for CppCon 2014 to be held September 7–12, 2014 at the Meydenbauer Center in Bellevue, Washington, USA. The conference will start with the keynote by Bjarne Stroustrup titled “Make Simple Tasks Simple!”

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:

• Invited talks and panels: the CppCon keynote by Bjarne Stroustrup will start off 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, but other than that it is non-partisan and has no agenda. 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.