Short Talk Ensemble (Part 2)

This month we have the great pleasure to welcome three speakers: Arian Ajdari, Nikolai Kutiavin, and Michele Martone to our user group.

Arian is a Software Engineer working on cutting-edge applications in the field of smart home appliances. His daily work includes discussions with clients, gathering requirements, building use-cases and implementing different solutions using C++. Arian possesses a deep understanding of the whole software stack (starting from PID 1 when the Linux kernel launches, up to different containerization technologies) in order to implement the best-possible solution in a constrained environment utilizing the newest features of C++. Arian has a general interest in C++ as a programming language and strives to utilize its capabilities in offering the best solution possible for clients and customers. Furthermore, he likes to take part in different C++ conferences and follows the standardization process of C++. In spare time, Arian enjoys discussing different topics, having long walks, watching a movie, or following motorsport.

Nikolai is a C++ engineer at Mapbox and the author of No More Helloworlds.

Michele (https://michelemartone.org) has long worked in supporting scientific research with HPC (parallelization and optimization of large codes). He has a number of contributions to freely licensed software. His main contribution to HPC is the "LIBRSB" library for parallel sparse computations. Then, in order to support ambitious HPC-oriented "refactorings" of large codebases he worked on extending the Coccinelle source-to-source translator together with its main author, Julia Lawall. If you're a Linux power user you might have used his "FIM - Fbi IMproved" image viewer.

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AEMBER: Modern Embedded C++ Without the Chaos (Arian Ajdari)
Building embedded systems wastes time on infrastructure instead of features. Before running application logic, developers lose hours bootstrapping init systems, wiring services, debugging startup failures, and fighting tooling never designed for constrained or early-boot environments. AEMBER is a developer-first PID1 (init system) that eliminates this overhead by providing a modern C++ runtime for process supervision, container orchestration, and service management - letting you focus on your application, not your plumbing.

This talk demonstrates how C++23 enables robust embedded systems without sacrificing performance. We'll explore std::expected for exception-free error handling, if consteval for compile-time optimization paths, and deducing this for zero-overhead policy classes. You'll see how monadic operations compose system calls into clean pipelines, and how modern C++ features build type-safe APIs for namespaces, cgroups, and process management.

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C++ → FlatBuffers → Kotlin: A Data-Sharing Pipeline (Nikolai Kutiavin)
At Mapbox, we have a setup where both the core logic written in C++ and platform-specific code written in Kotlin need access to the same navigation data.

In this talk, I’ll explain why we use FlatBuffers for data sharing between C++ and Kotlin, how this pipeline works, and what pitfalls we encountered along the way.

This talk may be useful for developers working with multi-language codebases, especially in cross-platform applications.

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A Programming Language for Refactoring. Quick Tour using the Coccinelle Semantic Patching Engine with C++ (Michele Martone)
A rule of thumb for maintaining consistency in an evolving codebase is to keep committed changesets small and intelligible. Nevertheless, it's still possible that a step of a larger refactoring may involve a rather huge changeset. That's problematic.

Coccinelle is a system capable of expressing changesets in an own programming language resembling C/C++ and GNU patch. Coccinelle use is being championed by the Linux Kernel community for finding buggy code patterns and keeping up with changing APIs in C (e.g. in device drivers). Let's check it out for C++!

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Schedule
18:00 -- Open Doors
18:30 -- Welcome by MVTec/MUC++
18:35 -- Short Talk by Nikolai Kutiavin
~19:00 -- Dinner break
20:00 -- Short talk by Michele Martone
20:20 -- Talk by Arian Ajdari
22:00 -- Official End

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Sponsor: MVTec (https://www.mvtec.com)