Future direction of C++ and C++20: on the road towards heterogeneous programming

On our December meetup, we're excited to host Michael Wong, a senior member of the C++ standard committee! Michael will talk about what is expected in C++20 and beyond, and in particular how C++ moves towards supporting heterogeneous execution environments.

Agenda:
17:00 to 17:30 - Gathering and refreshments. Thank you Daynix!
17:30 to 19:00+ - The future direction of C++ and C++20: on the road towards heterogeneous programming
~19:00 to ~19:15 - Wrap-up and raffle

Abstract:
C++ 20 is sure to be a major release but have you ever wondered if there is a direction to C++?
The C++ Direction Group has set a future direction for C++ and includes recommendation for C++ in the short and medium term. It will have immediate impact on what will enter C++20, and beyond. The first half of this talk will devote to the Directions Groups' description of where future C++ is heading as a member of the DG and show some of the features that have already landed towards C++20.
Next, I will present the current status of parallel programming support in C++ as well as an outline of the upcoming features related to parallelism in C++20 and its accompanying technical specifications.
C++11 became a parallel and concurrent language with support for mutable shared state, asynchronous capabilities, and concurrent collections. C++14 added a few minor fixes. C++17 took that further by standardizing parallel algorithms. C++20 will include additions from Parallel TS2 containing SIMD and Task blocks.
But the most significant change is actually below the surface as C++ moves towards heterogeneous support with changes that started in C++11 with lambda, pushed forward with C++17 with Thread of Execution, and then soon to enter C++20 with executors. These form a subtle but definite direction towards heterogeneous programming support.

Note: The Core C++ group will host a similar talk by Michael on 20/12, at Mevasseret - https://www.meetup.com/CoreCpp/events/257065101/

Bio:
Michael Wong is the VP of R&D at Codeplay Software, a Scottish company that produces compilers, debuggers, runtimes, testing systems, and other specialized tools to aid software development for heterogeneous systems, accelerators and special purpose processor architectures, including GPUs and DSPs. He is now a member of the open consortium group known as Khronos and is Chair of the C++ Heterogeneous Programming language SYCL, used for GPU dispatch in native modern C++ (14/17) and OpenCL. For 20 years, he was the Senior Technical Strategy Architect for IBM compilers. He is the Canadian Head of Delegation to the ISO C++ Standard and a past CEO of OpenMP. He is also a Director and VP of ISOCPP.org, and Chair of all Programming Languages for Canada’s Standard Council. He chairs WG21 SG14 Games Development/Low Latency/Financial/Embedded Devices and WG21 SG5 Transactional Memory.
For more, visit https://wongmichael.com/about

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