A milestone

At the formal closing of CppCon 2018, we took a moment to consider how far we’ve come in the first five years of the conference. Those years have seen us grow in so many ways. Since our first conference, we’ve added classes, field trips, author signings, exhibitor tables and booths, Tool Time, and the SG14 co-located ISO meeting. The number of main program sessions has grown by about fifty percent to almost one hundred fifty.  The number of Open Content sessions has doubled to about two dozen. The number of conference days (including classes)  has doubled from four and a half to nine and the number of attendees has doubled from about six hundred to over twelve hundred.

A new home

It is fitting that we take stock of our growth this year because we’ve reached an important milestone for the conference. We’ve out-grown our original venue. The home of the conference during it first five years has been the Meydenbauer Center, whose staff has played a critical role in our great success during those years . It was with a great deal of excitement and not a little sadness that we ended CppCon 2018 by announcing that CppCon 2019 will be in our new home at the Gaylord Rockies in Aurora, Colorado during the week of September 15th, 2019.

Building on the success of this year’s pre and post-conference classes, we will be offering classes on September 14th-15th and 21st-22nd. The CppCon 2018 Registration Reception will be on the 15th and sessions will be the 16th though the 20th.

Content

In the meantime, look for slides and source code for your favorite CppCon 2018 sessions at our presentation material repository.

You can find the posters that were entered in the CppCon 2018 Poster Competition in the poster repository.

You can also watch CppCon 2018 session videos on YouTube and Channel 9. Some of them are already available on the CppCon YouTube channel in the CppCon 2018 playlist.

Thanks and trip reports

I want to say thanks very much to all the hundreds of people that made CppCon 2018 possible and, in particular, I want to thank those that have published trip reports:

CppCon 2018 Trip report by Anny G

CppCon 2018 by Rainer Grimm (German version)

JetBrains C++ team at CppCon 2018: trip report by the JetBrains C++ team

CppCon 2018 trip report by Mathieu Ropert

Report on CPPCon 2018 by Eduardo Madrid

Back from CppCon 2018 by Juan Manuel Martinez Caamaño and Serge Guelton

CppCon 2018 Trip Report by Matthew Butler

À propos de cppcon 2018 by Patrice Roy (in French)

Trip report – CppCon 2018 by Jean Guegant

The (Late) CppCon 2018 Trip Report by JeanHyde Meneide

Video Trip Report:
My CppCon Story by Arno Lepisk

Podcasts:
Take Up Code #244: CppCon: What did I learn? And What Will Help You? by Wahid Tanner

CppCon Lightning Interviews by Jason Turner and Rob Irving (w/ Anastasia, Timur, Phil, Staffan, Matthew, Tony, Jens, Anny G., Borislav, Ezra, Jean-Louis)

If you know of any trip reports I’ve missed, please let me know. I plan to update this post with new trip reports as I learn about about them.

I look forward to seeing you in Aurora next September.

Join 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.

We’re pleased to announce that the 2018 Poster Program is now available!  We have sixteen outstanding entries this year, and would like to encourage you to stop by and read all of them.

The 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!

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.

We are pleased to announce our remaining plenary speaker for CppCon 2017: Titus Winters.

Titus leads Google’s C++ common libraries project and is one of four arbiters of Google’s official C++ style guidelines. For the last 6 years, Titus has been organizing, maintaining, and evolving the foundational components of Google’s C++ codebase using modern automation and tooling. Titus also designed much of Google’s internal C++ training curriculum, and reinvented Google’s C++ mentorship program. Prior to tackling these large scale C++ challenges, Titus worked on networking APIs in embedded systems.

As a member of the C++ standards committee, Titus focuses his efforts on the evolution of the standard library and is the incoming chair of the Library Evolution Working Group. In addition, Titus is an active speaker in the broader C++ industry and community, advocating for more scalable and maintainable coding guidelines and practices.

He has also been known to have deep thoughts about the card game Hanabi and the proper preparation of classic cocktails, although sometimes these run at cross purposes.

Titus’ presentation, C++ as a “Live at Head” Language,  will start with an exciting announcement; we’re keeping the details to ourselves until CppCon 2017.