Meeting C++ 2016 trip report

This year I’ve finally made it to Meeting C++ conference in Berlin, which is quite funny because I live in this beautiful city and for me the “trip” part consists in using the tram and S-Bahn for 30 minutes to get to the location (Andels Hotel, really nice one), but due work duties, I’ve never managed to attend.

This year it was the 5th one and as key facts, there was as opening keynote Bjarne Stroustrup, who presented the current status of C++ and its challenges for the future, including its evolution and its fight to keep legacy code still valid while introducing new features and optimizations, and a list of really good presentations about what’s possible and what could be possible in the future standards.

One of my favourite talks was about the C++ memory model and atomic variables in a multi thread environment done by @Rainer Grimm, but the clear trend to prefer compile-time computation over the runtime one has emerged by the presented talks and especially in the closing keynote of @Louis Dionne, who presented Boost.Hana and the impact of metaprogramming in the optimization of simple tasks, when the information is available at compile time (I’m still skeptical about this, as long as many application do need runtime information to work - computer vision, financial trading, machine learning just to mention a few of them).

This conference has again confirmed that C++ is still the best generic purpose programming language out there and the good news is that it’s lowering its knowledge barriers, introducing new facilities and hiding behind legacy ones, forcing programmers to write better code. This is enforced also by the Core Guidelines and helped by the Core Guideline Support Library (GSL). If you haven’t still read the guidelines, please do it as soon as you can.

Still the C++ community struggles to get the “dark matter” programmers out of the darkness and embrace Modern C++: a lot of efforts has being done through communities, especially in Europe, where the meetups are constantly increasing in number, but the engagement isn’t still high, and, as brought to our attention by @Arne Mertz, the resources are still inadeguate and only few single point of convergence are available and reliable, such as isocpp.org website and StackOverflow.

This is really a good time to be alive and to learn C++, so join the journey!