Meetup #13: Exceptions and databases

Please join us for our 13th official C++ Helsinki Meetup! After our long summer break, we finally meet again for talks and discussion about the C++ programming language.

This month, we are being sponsored by Lastrada. The meetup will be hosted at Maijansali, the event space on the ground floor of the Oodi Helsinki Central Library, Töölönlahdenkatu 4, 00100 Helsinki, Finland.

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 exciting talks for you:

Timur Doumler: "Exceptions in C++: a contemporary overview"

Exceptions are the default error handling mechanism in C++. Yet, many developers shy away from using exceptions and/or are not familiar with the details.

In this talk, we give an overview of how exceptions work and what exception support facilities are available in Standard C++. We cover how exception handling is implemented on different platforms and what tradeoffs (such as runtime or memory overhead) are involved. Along the way, we clarify some common misunderstandings such as the actual meaning of the common phrase "exception in flight". Finally, we give a quick overview over ongoing work to make exceptions in C++ better and more efficient.

This talk aims to be beginner-friendly while offering some of those "cool, I didn't know that!" moments for the experienced C++ developer.

Timur Doumler is the co-host of CppCast and an active member of the ISO C++ standard committee, where he is currently chairing SG21, the Contracts study group. Timur started his journey into C++ in computational astrophysics, where he was working on cosmological simulations. He then spent a decade working in the audio and music technology industry, where he co-founded the music tech startup Cradle. Timur also worked for JetBrains, first as a developer improving CLion's homegrown C++ front-end and later as a Developer Advocate for their C++ developer tools. Currently, Timur lives in Finland and works as an independent consultant.

Christian Parpart: "Lightweight: fast yet type safe database access"

This talk introduces Lightweight, a new C++ SQL library that aims to provide a user-friendly API while maintaining high performance and type safety.

We'll discuss the design philosophy behind Lightweight and the challenges we overcame to create a solution that hides most boilerplate and low-level processes. The presentation will cover the library's iterative development, highlight practical usage examples, and offer an outlook on what's to come, including plans for C++26.

Christian Parpart is the Head of Development at LASTRADA, a leading software provider for the construction materials industry. He began his C++ career in 1991 and has since worked in various fields, including five years of professional compiler development and extensive UNIX application development. A dedicated advocate for open-source, he is also the project maintainer for the Contour terminal emulator and has been a practitioner and teacher of Aikido since 1991.

Schedule:

17:00 Doors
18:00 Introduction by the hosts & sponsors
18:10 Talk by Timur Doumler
18:40 Talk by Christian Parpart
19:40 Closing remarks
20:00 End

As usual, we are planning to go to a nearby restaurant/pub after the meetup to continue socialising and networking.