CppCon 2019 Trip Report

I’m on my way back from the 2019 CppCon conference and my head is buzzing with ideas! What an amazing experience!

The venue

This was the first year CppCon was based out of a new venue, the Gaylord Rockies in Aurora, Colorado. First up: the Gaylord is huge! It was clear we had outgrown the previous venue in Bellevue, but there’s plenty of room to expand at the new venue. This changed the feel of the conference a little: I literally didn’t leave the hotel from Sunday evening through to Friday evening.

Most of the attendees also stayed in the hotel, which meant more opportunities to bump into other attendees. Food was good, but not exceptional, but, boy it was expensive! They know they have a captive audience!

There was a beautiful pool and slide…but I didn’t think to pack any swimming gear. I arrived a couple of days before the conference and locked myself in my hotel room to finish my slide decks anyway…

The keynotes

The keynotes were all brilliant, and all are already up on YouTube so you can check them out there. Briefly:

Bjarne Stroustrup - C++ at 20. A good, if unsurprising state of the language address from its creator. Nice to see some new module syntax!
Andrei Alexandrescu - Speed is Found in the Minds of People - by far the most entertaining talk. Andrei is a loose cannon in the C++ community (or “free radical” as he described himself later in the week). This talk really makes you rethink how to optimise and how we need to think out of the box more often.
Ben Smith - Applied WebAssembly: Compiling and Running C++ in Your Web Browser - this caught my attention for obvious reasons :). Ben detailed his work in bringing a decent compilation environment in the browser (with more than one nod to Compiler Explorer). Amusingly I was in the front row and had a bit of minor interaction with him (I was the person who prompted him on the -c command-line option!).
Sean Parent - Better Code: Relationships - my first time seeing Sean present live. An excellent theoretical founding in how relationships between objects affect the architecture of code.
Herb Sutter - De-fragmenting C++: Making Exceptions and RTTI More Affordable and Usable (“Simplifying C++” #6 of N) - more on Herb’s quest to make C++ better for all users, and to heal the rift with those unable to use RTTI or exceptions.

The best of the rest

There were so many to choose from at each timeslot it was very hard not to suffer from Fear Of Missing Out! Here’s some random thoughts on some of the talks I attended:

Kate Gregory’s talk on naming was excellent as always. Kate’s an amazing presenter, and her instinct on what makes good code is spot on. We learned a number of good naming practices, and how to apply them.
JF Bastien’s “Let’s Deprecate volatile” was a masterpiece. Simple, but elegant slides (with some neat little touches), an animated speaker who is passionate about the subject, and lots and lots of funny edge cases in C and C++. Fabulous.
Hana Dusíková’s talk on her latest updates to her compile-time regular expression library was fabulous. Her interactive slides that show how the DFAs and NFAs are built really help get the point across, and of course she’s just so knowledgeable about how to efficiently and effectively use compile-time programming.
Matt Kulukundis gave an expert presentation (with cameos from Hyrum Wright) on the latest in the abseil hash map implementation. The topic’s 100% up my street, of course, but Matt is a great presenter (and advertiser of Mountain Dew).
Kostas Kyrimis presented all of ADL and its gotchas in an ambitious first talk. Never have I been so scared to make a top-level function! :)
Peter Bindels and Sy Brand, somehow, managed to explain “Hello World from Scratch”. From compiler, optimiser, assembler, linker and loader…it was quite a ride in 60m! They’re a great presenting duo, too.
Talking of presenting duos, Barbara and Ansel presented their vision of a GPU-driven UI library, with UHD graphics for all. Definitely one to watch!

There were many other great talks too; these are just the first few that I had notes to hand as I write this on the plane on the way back to Chicago.

My talks

I was really pleased with how my talks went. I had a lot of comments on my path tracer talk, and I’ll be blogging about it (with some follow-up investigations) over the next few weeks.

The slides:

Path Tracing Three Ways - in which I showcase three versions of a path tracer written in different C++ styles, with a performance surprise detour at the end.
Compiler Explorer: Behind the Scenes - in which I further ride on the coat-tails of other, smarter folks and explain how I duct-taped together Compiler Explorer.

Conclusions

Conferences are a fantastic place to learn new things. Often things you didn’t know that you didn’t know. They’re also a place to strengthen relationships between disparate groups of the community, meet new friends, and put faces to Twitter handles. CppCon is absolutely the best conference for C++: if you can only get to one conference a year, make CppCon 2020 a priority!