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CppCon 2024 Back to Basics: Unit Testing in C++ -- Dave Steffen

By Blog Staff | Jun 12, 2025 01:08 PM | Tags: None

Registration is now open for CppCon 2025! The conference starts on September 15 and will be held in person in Aurora, CO. To whet your appetite for this year’s conference, we’re posting videos of some of the top-rated talks from last year's conference. Here’s another CppCon talk video we hope you will enjoy – and why not register today for CppCon 2025!

Back to Basics: Unit Testing in C++

by Dave Steffen

Summary of the talk:

Unit Testing is a big, complicated subject. With good advice coming in from books, conference talks, and blog posts beyond count, it's a daunting topic even for experienced developers. Can we make the subject more approachable?

Yes we can. If we look a little deeper, there are some fundamental principles behind the advice. Further, these principles seem to belong to a small number of "domains", each addressing a very different aspect of unit testing and software development.

For example, "Test error conditions separately", "Tests should be easy to read", and "Write the unit tests first" are all great advice, but each is aiming for a very different goal.

In this talk, we'll survey these domains of unit testing practice, identify some of the basic practices involved in each, and put the larger discussion of unit testing into a more useful context. We will also see how some unit testing practices enhance or conflict with others, and how these controversies reveal deep philosophical questions that have real consequences for how we go about the day-to-day activity of testing our code.

CppCon 2024 The Main Points in C++ - Dots in C++ -- Miodrag Misha Djukic

By Blog Staff | Jun 10, 2025 01:04 PM | Tags: None

Lightning Talk: The Main Points in C++ - Dots in C++

by Miodrag Misha Djukic

Summary of the talk:

A simple element of punctuation marks -- a point (dot) -- but used for so much. What are the all the ways a point is used in C++? Can you list them all? One point (dot), two points (colon), three points (ellipsis), four points (double colon). Let’s quickly go over all the usages: a well known ones, but also some that are encountered not so often.

CppCon 2024 Cost of C++ Abstractions in C++ Embedded Systems -- Marcell Juhasz

By Blog Staff | Jun 6, 2025 01:00 PM | Tags: None

Cost of C++ Abstractions in C++ Embedded Systems

by Marcell Juhasz

Summary of the talk:

This session will feature detailed case studies that measure the overhead associated with common programming abstractions in the context of embedded systems. By examining both compile-time and run-time implications, attendees will gain valuable insights into how these abstractions impact system resources like memory usage and execution speed.

Key areas of exploration will include:

Encapsulation: Assessing the cost of data hiding and interface protection depending on implementation strategies.
Inheritance: Evaluating the costs and benefits of using class hierarchies in environments where memory and processing power are limited.
Polymorphism: Comparing run-time polymorphism via virtual functions to compile-time alternatives like templates and concepts, analyzing their respective impacts on performance and flexibility.

Through empirical data and performance metrics, participants will observe how traditional object-oriented techniques affect resource utilization. The discussion will also cover the advantages and trade-offs of these techniques, providing a balanced view of their impact on embedded systems.

Designed for developers and system architects working within the constraints of embedded systems, this talk aims to provide valuable insights into making informed decisions about when and how to use specific programming abstractions. Attendees will leave with a clearer perspective on optimizing their code for maximum efficiency, armed with practical knowledge about the trade-offs involved in adopting various software design paradigms.

CppCon 2024 Rust Programming in 5 Minutes -- Tyler Weaver

By Blog Staff | Jun 4, 2025 12:56 PM | Tags: None

Lightning Talk: Rust Programming in 5 Minutes

by Tyler Weaver

Summary of the talk:

I'm now working in Rust and now I have time for all sorts of frivolous learning. It is glorious. I'm going to try in 5min to teach a bit of Rust to a C++ audience.

CppCon 2024 Introduction to Wait-free Algorithms in C++ Programming -- Daniel Anderson

By Blog Staff | Jun 2, 2025 12:49 PM | Tags: None

Introduction to Wait-free Algorithms in C++ Programming

by Daniel Anderson

Summary of the talk:

If you've attended any talks about concurrency, you've no doubt heard the term "lock-free programming" or "lock-free algorithms". Usually these talks will give you a slide that explains vaguely what this means, but you accept that is is approximately (but not quite exactly) equal to "just don't use locks". More formally, lock-freedom is about guaranteeing how much progress your algorithm will make in a given time. Specifically, a lock-free algorithm will always make some progress on at least one operation/thread. It does not guarantee however that all threads make progress. In a lock-free algorithm, a particular operation can still be blocked for an arbitrary long time because of the actions of other contending threads. What can we do in situations where this is unacceptable, such as when we want to guarantee low latency for every operation on our data structure rather than just low average latency?

In these situations, there is a stronger progress guarantee that we can aim for called wait-freedom. An algorithm is wait free if every operation is guaranteed to make progress in a bounded amount of time, i.e., no thread can ever be blocked for an arbitrarily long time. This helps to guarantee low tail latency for all operations, rather than low average latency in which some operations are left behind. In this talk, we will give an introduction to designing and implementing wait-free algorithms.

Without assuming too much background of the audience, we will review the core ideas of lock-free programming and understand the classic techniques for transforming a blocking algorithm into a lock-free one. The main bread-and-butter technique for lock-free algorithms is the compare-exchange loop or "CAS loop", in which an operation reads the current state of the data structure, creates some sort of updated version, and then attempts to install the update via a compare-exchange, looping until it succeeds. compare-exchange loops suffer under high contention since the success of one operation will often cause another to have to repeat work until they succeed. The bread-and-butter technique of wait-free programming that overcomes this issue is helping. When operations contend, instead of racing to see who wins, an operation that encounters another already-in-progress operation attempts to help it complete first, then proceeds with its own operation. This results in the initial operation succeeding instead of being clobbered and forced to try again.

CppCon 2024 Strategies for Developing Safety-Critical Software in C++ -- Emily Durie-Johnson

By Blog Staff | May 30, 2025 12:45 PM | Tags: None

Lightning Talk: Strategies for Developing Safety-Critical Software in C++

by Emily Durie-Johnson

Summary of the talk:

This talk delves into the importance of a safety-first mindset in software development within the medical device domain. It explores the intersection of C++ and industry standards that ensure safety-critical software. Attendees will learn to ask guiding questions during code development that emphasize the importance of coding as if the technology will be used on their loved ones. With real-world examples and best practices, this session highlights the personal and professional responsibilities of engineers in safety-critical fields to create reliable software.

CppCon 2024 C++ Under the Hood: Internal Class Mechanisms -- Chris Ryan

By Blog Staff | May 28, 2025 12:41 PM | Tags: None

C++ Under the Hood: Internal Class Mechanisms

by Chris Ryan

Summary of the talk:

My talk will examine the internal C++ mechanisms around the topics of:

The C++ onion as it relates to construction, destruction and polymorphism,

Order of Object construction & destruction, and pre- & post-main() processing.

Member Function Pointers (not your father’s C function pointer),

Member Data Pointers (not raw pointers) (data-morphic functionality),

Understanding the Call Stack, Stack Frames and Base Pointer mechanisms.

using std::cpp 25: Keynote: C++: The Balancing Act of Power, Compatibility, and Safety - Juan Alday

By jdgarcia | May 28, 2025 10:28 AM | Tags: None

Keynote at using std::cpp 2025.

Why C++?

At using std::cpp 2025, Juan Alday gave us very good insights to this question. He also reminded us one or two things about C++ past to talk about C++ future.

Video: Keynote: C++: The Balancing Act of Power, Compatibility, and Safety - Juan Alday

CppCon 2024 Peering Forward - C++’s Next Decade -- Herb Sutter

By Blog Staff | May 26, 2025 12:37 PM | Tags: None

Peering Forward - C++’s Next Decade

by Herb Sutter

Summary of the talk:

This is an exciting year for ISO C++: In just the past few months, it has started to become clear that C++ is approaching three major positive turning points that are starting to materialize together in a blossoming of usability we haven’t seen since C++11.

First, compile-time reflection, including source generation, will dominate the next decade of C++ as arguably the most powerful feature that we’ve ever standardized, and (fingers crossed!) it’s on track for being included in C++26 in the coming months. I expect reflection’s impact on library building to be comparable to that of all the other library-building improvements combined that we’ve added since C++98.

Second, memory safety is being taken seriously in WG21. After a decade or two of gradual smaller improvements, the committee is actively working toward taking the major step of enabling well-known proven-effective safety checks at compile time by default, without compromising performance.

Third, simplifying C++ is being taken seriously. I’m not the only person actively proposing simplifications to C++, and I expect the rate of simplification proposal papers to increase again in the coming year as the fruits of in-the-field experiments turn into evidence that the experimental improvements are working and are ready to be considered for ISO C++ itself to benefit all programmers.

Most of all, the above overlap and reinforce each other. For example, reflection will enable writing more new facilities as compile-time libraries instead of as language features that have to be baked into a compiler, which helps simplify future language evolution. Reflection will also enable compile-time libraries that let developers express their intent directly and leave it to the library code to accurately generate correct implementations, which helps reduce errors and makes our code both simpler and safer.

ISO C++ has long been solidly in the top 5 programming languages and is going strong. This talk presents reasons to expect that C++’s future is bright, and that perhaps its most important decade is just ahead.

CppCon 2024 From Macro to Micro in C++ -- Conor Spilsbury

By Blog Staff | May 24, 2025 12:32 PM | Tags: None

Lightning Talk: From Macro to Micro in C++

by Conor Spilsbury

Summary of the talk:

Our continuous real-time monitoring led us to investigate an anomaly in the data about our system's performance. This led us to investigate and identify the culprit: a specific data structure used in our code and the way that structure was being initialized.