Last month I attending C++Con in at the Meyenbauer Center in Bellevue, Washington. It was the first year, but you never would have known. There were 600+ attendees and a strong set of presenters. The presentations came from standards committee members, NASA employees, and even Bjarne himself.

Jon Kalb was the organizer and he used a similar format to his other conference, C++Now (formerly BoostCon). The days are long and packed with a huge variety of talks. Topics covered ranged from using Boost to bridge the C++98/11 gap and large scale refactoring to vision systems on Mars rovers and what is coming in the C++17 standard. Most daytime talks were slideshow-style. Most evening talks were panel discussions. Each morning had lightning talks by people who just signed up and presented on any topic.

From F5 there were about 8 people attending. Neeraj Poddar and I were the only ones from the LineRate team. Rachel Cheng and Michael VanLoon presented on using Boost to bridge the gap between C++98 and C++11. I gave a lightning talk on Test-driven Performance.

I attended:

• Type Deduction and Why You Care - Scott Meyers
• Modernizing Legacy C++ - James McNellis & Kate Gregory
• Lock-Free Programming - Herb Sutter
• Efficiency with Algorithms, Performance with Data Structures - Chandler Carruth
• Meet the Authors - C++ Standards Committee
• Practical Functional Programming - Bryce Adelstein-Lelbach
• Makes Simple Tasks Simple! - Bjarne Stroustrup
• Implementing wire protocols with Boost Fusion - Thomas Rodgers
• Embind and Emscriptem - Chad Austin
• Pragmatic Type Erasure - Zach Laine
• Lightning Talks - Kate Gregory, Jeff Trull, Leor Zolman, Jens Weller, Michael VanLoon... more
• Philosohy of Google's C++ Code - Titus Winters
• C++ on Mars - Incorporating C++ on Mars Rover Flight Software - Mark Maimone
• Making Allocators Work - Alisdair Meredith
• Large-Scale Refactoring @ Google - Hyrum Wright
• Grill the Committee
• Practical Type Erasure - Cheinan Marks
• Data-Oriented Design - Mike Acton
• STL Feature and Implementation Techniques - Stephan T. Lavavej
• Mo' Hustle Mo' Problems - Andrei Alexandrescu
• Types Don't Know # - Howard Hinnant
• await 2.0 - Stackless Resumable Functions - Gor Nishanov
• Back to the Basics! Essentials of Modern C++ Style - Herb Sutter

Summary

Humor was definitely on this packed agenda. It wasn't all super-dry type deduction talks. There were arguments, jokes, and a poll about Scott Meyer's hair. This is a conference for C++ programmers, not beginners. It has talks which do span the range of capabilities, but attendees are required to have knowledge of C++ as a base. Having an understanding of language design certainly helps attendees get the most out of it.

If any of the talks look like they are of interest you can get the slides on GitHub and the videos on YouTube. I am looking forward to next year!