CppCon Special Report

27.10.2016 Frances Tait No comments

KDAB has long supported the C++ community, as C++ is the backbone of Qt and up-to-date knowledge of its changes keeps us on the leading edge in the Qt world.

Later this year we shall be supporting Europe’s Meeting C++ in Berlin, but now that this year’s talks have been released we felt it was time for a Special Report on CppCon which ran from September 17th-23rd this autumn in Bellevue, WA.

KDAB’s Kévin Ottens was on the program committee and reviewed the talks at this year’s show, while Giuseppe D’Angelo (Peppe) contributed a day’s training on Programming with Qt Widgets, and two Lightning Talks on Qt (see them here and here), as well as attending the rest of the event.

We asked Kévin and Peppe to list their top three talks so we could get the insider as well as the attendee perspective. This is what they gave us:

Kévin’s top three

1. C++ on the Web: Let’s have some serious fun (Video)

• “Shows that C++ is very versatile and can be used even in the trendy web field unlike what most engineers assume.”

2. Iterator Haiku, Casey Carter (Video)

• “Because iterators in general reduce opportunities of errors in your code, and it will become even better with the ranges.”

3. How to test static_assert? (Video)

• “I love static_assert to catch mistakes and wrong assumptions even earlier in the development process, but I also want my code to be tested as much as possible. As the title implies, it’s a perfect match.”

Peppe’s top three

1. Lifetime Safety… By Default: Making Code Leak-Free by Construction (Video)

• “It was the keynote by Herb Sutter. Great speaker and great content.”

2. What C++ Programmers Need to Know about Header <random> (Video)

• “Because everyone has a program that needs a random integer between 1 and 42 and does it wrong. <random> does it right.”

3. My Little Optimizer: Undefined Behavior is Magic (Video)

• “In case you were looking for arguments why you should never ever ever ever trigger undefined behavior: compilers see your bluffs and do terrible things.”

You can see Giuseppe’s blog post about CppCon here.