In this instructor interview, Kevin Carpenter welcomes Patrice Roy for a discussion of his CppCon Academy class, Managing Memory. Patrice has been a professor for over two decades and has been to every CppCon, but this is his first time at CppCon as a Ph.D graduate!

Patrice and Kevin discuss what attendees will get out of his class. This class is for people coming from other languages that want to do C++ right and for people who have been writing C++ that want to do it better, to get more control, more speed, and more resilience. There are a number of details of specialized knowledge, but they can be simple and fun. People will end the class knowing how to do things because they’ll have done them in the class.

In addition to his class, Patrice is also going to be presenting two talks for the Main Program. The idea for Some Things C++ Does Right comes from identifying the things about C++ that he misses most when teaching classes that use other languages.

The Surprising Costs of void() (and Other Not-Quite-Innocuous Evils) comes from the fact that as a professor grading the work of students he reads a lot of code written by bright people that are still learning, “so they do all sorts of weird things.” When he pointed these “weird things” out to other instructors he found that many knowledgable, experienced people don’t always recognizes some of these mistakes for what they are. This talk will give you a lot to think about.