Peering forward: C++'s next decade

We have a very special event for you this month, with a talk from our visiting speaker, Herb Sutter! We also have a talk from another visiting speaker - all the way from Cambridge! Greg Law will take us back in time, as Herb takes us forward.

Herb will be flying in on the way to the WG21 meeting in Sofia, Bulgaria. As C++26 rounds out, what a great time to look ahead at the next decade for C++!

Thanks to Herb's new employer, Citadel Securities, we have secured a larger venue so we'll get more in! Citadel Securities will also be providing drinks and light snacks.

As usual we'll kick-off at 19:00 and run to about 21:00.

18:30 Doors open

19:00 "Intro and news" - Phil Nash

19:10 "Peering backward: C++'s last ten minutes" - Greg Law

Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. With the new generation of time travelling debuggers it doesn't have to be that way! Time travel lets you see exactly what your program did: full memory + registers for every line that executed. There are open-source and commercial products available today for C++ that work with code at scale.

19:35 break

20:00 "Peering forward: C++'s next decade" - Herb Sutter

These are exciting times for C++. C++26 is poised to do what C++11 did over a decade ago: usher in a new era of C++ code style. Just as we can now glance at 10 or 20 lines and quickly recognize “modern C++” as C++11-era code, soon we’ll be able to do the same with code that uses std::execution, contracts, memory safety improvements, and (fingers crossed) reflection, and quickly see it’s “modern” C++26-era code. A second wave of modernization, marked by a visibly refreshed language and style -- and compilers are already aggressively implementing C++26 features without waiting for the standard to finalize next year.

21:00 Finish, then "reconvene" somewhere nearby to continue...

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About the speakers:

Herb Sutter is a technical fellow at Citadel Securities and chairs the ISO C++ standards committee. He is also the designer or co-designer of several standard C++ features, and the author of four books and hundreds of articles about software development.

Greg is co-founder and CEO at Undo.io. He is a coder at heart, but likes to bridge the gap between the business and software worlds. He has held development and leadership roles at companies including the pioneering British computer firm Acorn, as well as fast-growing start ups, NexWave and Solarflare. It was at Acorn that Greg met Julian and on evenings and weekends, they invented the core technology that would eventually become Undo.

Greg Law holds a PhD from City University of London. He lives in Cambridge, UK with his wife and two children. In his spare time, Greg catches up on email.