C++ London

 
 
 

This month we welcome back Timur Doumler, visiting from Finland, to give us a preview of the talk he'll be giving at ACCU the following week.

We're grateful to Smarkets for hosting us this month in their spectacular loft venue overlooking St. Katherine Docks, near Tower Bridge (we were last here in 2019).

Please note that we'll need the complete list of all names for the door list two days before the event - so the RSVP will close on Tuesday 11th April. You will also need to be able to show ID matching that name at the door. Names will be collected on registration and will not be published anywhere else.

We still have room for a shorter/ lightning talk (5-10 mins). If you might like to do one please let me know. For that, or if you'd like to speak at a future event please get in touch at cppldn.uk/speak.

Here's the full schedule (subject to change):

19:00 "Intro and News" - Phil Nash

19:10 "A word from our hosts" - Smarkets

19:15 "tbd" - short talk

19:30 "Standard attributes in C and C++" - Timur Doumler

This talk is an in-depth tour of the standard attributes currently available in the C and C++ programming languages.Some attributes such as deprecated, fallthrough, nodiscard, and maybeunused are very helpful to produce or suppress warnings. Others, such as likely and unlikely, can be used as optimisation hints to the compiler, although it can be difficult to avoid misuse and accidentally pessimise your code instead. The attributes noreturn and assume can even inject undefined behaviour into your code. And then there is nounique_address, which can be used to optimise the class layout, but comes with its own caveats regarding portability across major compilers.C++ has had standard attributes since C++11, and every new standard is adding more. The C language introduced attributes in C23, adopted many attributes from C++, and added two new attributes exclusive to C: unsequenced and reproducible.In this talk, we will describe the syntax and semantics of all existing standard attributes, including the latest additions in C23 and C++23, discuss the use cases for each one, show practical code examples, and offer guidelines on how to use them safely and effectively. We will also talk about the often-misunderstood C++ language design rule that attributes are "ignorable" and what that actually means.

21:00 conclusion

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About the speakers

Timur is the Developer Advocate for C++ tools at JetBrains and co-host of CppCast. He is an active member of the ISO C++ standard committee, where he is currently co-chair of the Contracts study group. As a developer, he worked many years in the audio and music technology industry and co-founded the music tech startup Cradle. Timur is passionate about clean code, good tools, low latency, and the evolution of the C++ language.