CppCon and Qt
27.09.2016
KDAB was proud to sponsor CppCon this year, continuing to foster the Qt / C++ connection, talking about Qt and soaking up the immense range of C++ knowledge on display. KDAB’s Giuseppe D’Angelo gave a much appreciated, two-day Qt Widgets training as a pre-conference class, a condensed version of one of our scheduled Qt trainings, available throughout the year.
There was so much to see and so much to learn, full program recordings will be up on-line soon, but here are some conference highlights from Giuseppe, starting with his comments on some of the Keynotes, which incidentally also included Bjarne Stroustrup’s talk, with advice from Machiavelli on the survival and evolution of C++:
CppCon Keynote highlights
extern “C”: Talking to C Programmers About C++, by Dan Salks. This is about the social and psychological mindsets that harm the discussion between C++ developers trying to convince C programmers that C++ is actually a much better language.
Rich Code For Tiny Machines: A Simple Commodore 64 Game In C++17, by Jason Turner. This is a crazy experiment involving building a x86->6510 assembly translator, then using C++17 on Clang to develop Pong, getting at the end a version with absolutely zero overhead. Best part: he unveiled a C64 on stage and played it live against Herb Sutter.
Lifetime safety by default – making code leak-free by construction. This is by Herb Sutter and not to be missed – Just the first 30 minutes could be repurposed to any C++ technical conference, university class, blog post or online webinar. This is mandatory knowledge for any C++ developer.
Other talks to look out for include C++ Modules state of the union, by Gabriel Dos Reis, a good introduction to modules, how they work, how to use them, how to “convert” libraries to modules, where we are now, and what comes with VS 15; “My Little Optimizer: Undefined Behavior is Magic”, by Michael Spencer, which shows all sorts of evil tricks the optimizer is allowed to do since it assumes that undefined behavior never ever happens; An introduction to C++ Coroutines, if you want to learn what coroutines are and how the compiler will assist you at writing more compact, more expressive, more efficient async code.
Last, but not least: the lightning talks. Miscellaneous, very funny, go watch ’em all when they are on-line.
Giuseppe gave one about reaching out to the Qt people in the audience; and, after the talk, many people greeted him with “hello! I use Qt!”