We’ve previously announced keynotes by Bjarne Stroustrup on Concept-based Generic Programming, Matt Godbolt on C++ and Assembly Vittorio Romeo on Practical Data-Oriented Design, and by Daisy Hollman on Crafting code.

We’re pleased to announce our final keynote of CppCon 2025! Herb Sutter is renowned C++ expert, author, and speaker, and currently serving as President of the Standard C++ Foundation. He has played a pivotal role in the evolution of modern C++, contributing to language features and concurrency models.

From Herb’s talk description:

Reflection: C++’s Decade-Defining Rocket Engine

In June 2025, C++ crossed a Rubicon: it handed us the keys to its own machinery. For the first time, C++ can describe itself—and generate more. The first compile-time reflection features in draft C++26 mark the most transformative turning point in our language’s history by giving us the most powerful new engine for expressing efficient abstractions that C++ has ever had, and we’ll need the next decade to discover what this rocket can do.

This session is a high-velocity tour through what reflection enables today in C++26, and what it will enable next. We’ll start with live compiler demos (Godbolt, of course) to show how much the initial C++26 feature set can already do. Then we’ll jump a few years ahead, using Dan Katz’s Clang extensions and my own cppfront reflection implementation to preview future capabilities that could reshape not just C++, but the way we think about programming itself.

We’ll see how reflection can simplify C++’s future evolution by reducing the need for as many bespoke new language features, since many can now be expressed as reusable compile-time libraries—faster to design, easier to test, and portable from day one. We’ll even glimpse how it might solve a problem that has long eluded the entire software industry, in a way that benefits every language.

The point of this talk isn’t to immediately grok any given technique or example. The takeaway is bigger: to leave all of us dizzy from the sheer volume of different examples, asking again and again, “Wait, we can do that now?!”—to fire up our imaginations to discover and develop this enormous new frontier together, and chart the strange new worlds C++ reflection has just opened for us to explore.

Reflection has arrived, more is coming, and the frontier is open. Let’s go.

Registration is open so don’t miss out on CppCon 2025 this September 14-19. Register today!

We’ve previously announced keynotes by Bjarne Stroustrup on Concept-based Generic Programming, Matt Godbolt on C++ and Assembly and by Vittorio Romeo on Practical Data-Oriented Design.

We’re pleased to announce our next keynote for CppCon 2025! Dr. Daisy Hollman is a distinguished software engineer and programming language expert, known for her impactful contributions to the C++ standards committee since 2016. She has worked on C++ language and library design at Google, and more recently joined Anthropic, where she explores the intersection of programming languages and AI systems.

From Daisy’s talk description:

Crafting the Code You Don’t Write: Sculpting Software in an AI World

It’s shockingly uncontroversial to say that the fields of developer experience and developer productivity have changed more in the past six months than in the 25 years before that.

As part of the Claude Code team at Anthropic, I’ve had the privilege of witnessing the evolution of agentic coding from proof-of-concept experiments to nearly autonomous software engineers in just six months. In this keynote, I’ll share some of my experiences and learnings from that journey, talk about how LLMs work more generally, attempt some live demonstrations of the latest functionality, explore the future of agentic programming, and tie all of this back to what it means for your workflow as a software engineer.

When I agreed to give this talk earlier this year, there was some portion of the narrative that involved “why you should be using agents to accelerate your development process.” Since then, the world of software engineering has evolved such that the interesting question is no longer “why” but “how.” Like sculptors facing the invention of power tools, or painters around the invention of photography, we now live in a world where vast quantities of rough-draft code can be generated with a very low barrier to entry. How does the role of a software engineer evolve when AI can autonomously implement features from requirements? How do we build safety features into the power tools we’re chiseling away at our codebases with? What aspects of software craftsmanship become more important, not less, in an age of abundant code generation? And critically for the C++ community: how do we leverage these tools where correctness and performance are non-negotiable? The future isn’t about AI replacing programmers, but about a fundamental shift in how we think about software creation. And surprisingly, you might not miss the old way of doing things.

Registration is open so don’t miss out on CppCon 2025 this September 14-19. Register today!

We’ve previously announced keynotes by Bjarne Stroustrup on Concept-based Generic Programming, and by Matt Godbolt on C++ and Assembly. 

We’re pleased to announce our next keynote for CppCon 2025! Vittorio Romeo is a highly respected figure in the C++ community, known for his deep expertise, prolific contributions, and engaging teaching style.

From Vittorio’s talk description:

More Speed & Simplicity: Practical Data-Oriented Design in C++

Data-Oriented Design (DOD) presents a different way of thinking: prioritizing data layout not only unlocks significant performance gains via cache efficiency but can also lead to surprising simplicity in the code that actually processes the data.

This talk is a practical introduction for C++ developers familiar with OOP. Through a step-by-step refactoring of a conventional OOP design, we’ll both cover how data access patterns influence speed and how a data-first approach can clarify intent.

We’ll measure the performance impact with benchmarks and analyze how the refactored code, particularly the data processing loops, can become more direct and conceptually simpler.

Key techniques like Structure-of-Arrays (SoA) vs. Array-of-Structures (AoS) will be explained and benchmarked, considering their effects on both execution time and code clarity. We’ll pragmatically weigh the strengths (performance, simpler data logic) and weaknesses of DOD, highlighting how it can complement, not just replace, OOP.

We’ll also demonstrate that DOD doesn’t necessitate abandoning robust abstractions, showcasing C++ techniques for creating safe, expressive APIs that manage both complexity and performance.

Let’s learn how thinking “data-first” can make your C++ code faster and easier to reason about!

Registration is open so don’t miss out on CppCon 2025 this September 14-19. Register today!

The Main Program schedule for CppCon 2025 is now live!

We’ll have over one hundred breakout sessions delivered onsite by the best C++ presenters in the industry, many returning from previous years as well as some exciting new voices. We will be announcing our five headline talks here in the coming days.

This year’s Main Program features a broad and deep general program. Within the program are eight dedicated topic tracks: The Back to Basics Track (sessions), the Embedded Track (sessions), the GameDev Track (sessions), the Robotics Track (sessions), the Scientific Computing Track (sessions), the Software Design Track (sessions), and Tooling Track (sessions) are back, and we have a new Business and Career Track (sessions)! These “tracks” are to help find talks in specific areas, but as always, there are lots of talks not assigned to a specific track covering a wide variety of important topics.

In addition to the Main Program, we’ll have our annual Committee Fireside Chat, our poster competition, multiple sessions of lightning talks, Open Content talks, BOFs, exhibitors, social events, pre/post-conference classes, and most importantly of all, the informal “hallway track,” providing the opportunity to engage with professionals from across our industry.

Most of the program is published, but we are still working on a few surprises, so keep checking back to see any new additions or time slot adjustments.

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!

We hope to see you all in just over a month—so register now.

We’re pleased to announce our next keynote for CppCon 2025! Matt Godbolt is a long time CppCon attendee and creator of Compiler Explorer. Godbolt, in addition to being a verb, is an excellent speaker and we are honored to have him as a returning keynote presenter.

From Matt’s talk description:

C++: Some Assembly Required

Join Matt in exploring how the C++ ecosystem has evolved through the interplay of intentional design and emergent collaboration. Standards committees craft language features and compiler teams implement them, but something amazing happens in the spaces between: tools appear, communities form, and solutions emerge that nobody quite planned for. What started as individual developers solving their own problems has grown into an interconnected ecosystem that shapes how we all write C++.

From documentation to testing, from build systems to package managers, we’ll examine how the C++ community has assembled itself around shared pain points and accidental standards. Using examples and perhaps too many rainforest metaphors, this talk celebrates not just the language we’ve built, but the organic ecosystem that’s grown up around it. Come discover why C++’s greatest strength might be that it’s always required some assembly.

Registration is open so don’t miss out on CppCon 2025 this September 14-19. Register today!

CppCon 2025 will kick off on Monday, September 15 with Bjarne Stroustrup back delivering the opening keynote in Aurora.

Bjarne’s opening keynotes for CppCon are one of the most anticipated and most watched talks in C++. His talks are always among the most viewed presentations on the CppCon YouTube Channel.

 

From his talk description:

Concept-based Generic Programming

This talk presents programming techniques to illustrate the facilities and principles of C++ generic programming using concepts. Concepts are C++’s way to express constraints on generic code. As an initial example, it provides a simple type system that eliminate narrowing conversions and provides range checking.

Concepts are used throughout to provide user-defined extensions to the type system. The aim is to show their utility and the fundamental ideas behind them, rather than to provide a detailed or complete explanation of C++’s language support for generic programming or the extensive support provided by the standard library.

The final sections briefly present design rationales and origins for key parts of the concept design, including use patterns, the relationship to Object-Oriented Programming, value arguments, syntax, concept type-matching, and definition checking. They also mention static reflection, a C++26 improvements in the support of general programming.

Be at CppCon again this year as Bjarne Stroustrup flies us above this complex landscape of issues and shines a spotlight on the most important things to know, and to think about, in C++ in 2025. Come to the talk, bring your questions, and don’t miss out!

Registration is now open so don’t miss out on CppCon 2025 this September 14-19. Register today!