Meetup #4: C++ Compilation, Linking, and File I/O

Please join us for our fourth official C++ Helsinki Meetup! Once again we meet for a series of talks and discussion about the C++ programming language.

This time we are being sponsored by Remedy Entertainment, the Finnish computer game studio famous for the Max Payne franchise, Alan Wake, Quantum Break and Control. Remedy is hosting us at their own office in Espoo. Anyone interested in the C++ programming language is welcome to attend!

Code of Conduct: By attending C++ Helsinki you agree to abide by the Berlin Code of Conduct. It is a primary goal of our meetup that our attendees feel safe, welcome, and included. If you have any concerns at all, please do not hesitate to contact the organizers Timur Doumler and Jeroen Akershoek here on meetup.com.

This month we again have two excellent C++ talks for you. Our first speaker is the C++ Helsinki co-organiser Jeroen Akershoek. As our second speaker, we're very excited to announce our first international guest, flying in all the way from the UK to speak at our meetup: Guy Davidson.

Jeroen Akershoek: Optimizing C++ Compilation and Linking – A Deep Dive

Everybody always likes to complain about build times for their C++ software. But why does it take so long? Where does all the time go, and what can we do to make things go faster?
In this talk we will take a look at build systems, project structure, and various C++ tips and techniques to improve your build time.

Jeroen Akershoek started programming at age 8 and has used C++ professionally for almost 25 years. He is now one of the lead developers for the Northlight engine at Remedy Games where he tinkers around with memory management, concurrency and build systems.

Guy Davidson: File I/O for Game Developers – Past, Present, and Future

If you have played a game on a computer in the last few decades, you will most likely have encountered a loading screen. This is used to advertise to the player that, among other things, data is being loaded from a storage device into the game. But why does this exist, why does it take so long, and how can we improve matters for the player?

In this talk we will discover the history of games and their development environments, the relationship between address space, RAM and storage hardware, how C++ abstracts file I/O and why it might not be the best fit for game developers, how a 64-bit address space changes everything, how #embed will change everything, and how C++29 (yes, 29) may upset the applecart yet again.

Although this talk is aimed at game developers who are often Windows programmers, it is relevant to anyone who has to read large amounts of data from local storage. Expect tales of woe, discovery and jubilation as I describe every surprising little thing I've learned about file I/O over the past 40 years and how C++ is heading for a great future in games.

Guy Davidson (he/him) is the Head of Engineering Practice at Creative Assembly, one of the UK's oldest and largest game development studios. Guy started writing games over 40 years ago and has spent the last 24 of them at Creative Assembly. He is the co-author of Beautiful C++: 30 Core Guidelines for writing clean, safe and fast code, published by Pearson in 2021. He is a frequent conference speaker and organiser, as well as being a co-founder of #include and a regular C++ committee participant.