A fellow colleague and me had the pleasure to attend this years Meeting C++ 2019 from November 14th-16th in Berlin. It was my second visit and a quite interesting and insightful one. Therefore I would like to give a short summary and share some of my take-aways.

General impressions

The organization and venue were great and everything from booking, catering and the talks went smoothly. The C++ Community is very professional and communication is very friendly and open. I am once again impressed that they openly addressed diversity problems, promoted and enforced a code of conduct and the like.

The social events, the legendary C++-Quiz (many thanks again to Diego) and the lightning talks provided relaxing counterparts to the hard technical stuff.

The keynotes

Design Rationale for <chrono> (Howard Hinnant)

The author of the new time- and date API <chrono> coming in C++20 presented the design and showed many examples of how to use it. While this keynote was very technical and maybe missing stories and jokes you often see in keynotes it was extremely interesting and insightful for me. The design and usage of the library is super-elegant and two elements really stood out for me:

1. Let the API user decide. More concretely the <chrono> library lets the programmer decide on an case-by-case basis what to do with overruns and illegal dates when making calculations. For example, what should happen if you add 1 year to february 29th? What if you add 1 month to the last day of October? <chrono> does not make that decision for you but lets you check if the date is legal and allows you to easily snap to the correct date, make an overflow to the next month or just throw an error.
2. Find the essence of your domain. The calendar implementation in <chrono> is based on the insight, that a calendar is only a collection of dates with unique names. So the most simple and canonical calendar (called sys_days) simply counts the days since 01.01.1970. Other calendars only need conversions from/to sys_days to be fully interoperable. Most other calendar APIs include time of day which often causes problems when doing calculations.

Can AI replace programmers? (Frances Buontempo)

Entertaining and interesting talk about the history, definition, types and current state of artificial intelligence. The core of todays AI is mostly about automation of non-trivial tasks. The interaction of real people in the feedback loop is totally mandatory today and this will stay so for quite some time. In addition the resulting code/artifacts are often totally incomprehensible for human beings.

Crazy Code and Crazy Coders (Walter E. Brown)

Very entertaining talk with tons of hair-raising real-life code examples. Walter used them not only to entertain but to bring attention to us programmers that we all bear a ton of responsibility for our code because we simply do not know where it will end up in a few years. So we absolutely must deal with it in a professional way or bad things will happen.

Other noteworthy stuff

There were of course a lot more great and interesting talks, so check out the slides or watch last years talks on youtube until this years are available. I just want to mention a few I personally attended and found worthwhile:

• Combining C++17 Features in Practice – Nicolai Josuttis
• The C++20 Synchronization Library – Bryce Adelstein Lelbach
• CPU design effects that can degrade performance of your programs – Jakub Beranek
• Value Propositon: Allocator-Aware Software – John Lakos
• Modules are Coming – Bryce Adelstein Lelbach
• Better Algorithm Intuition – Conor Hoekstra
• Squaring the circle: value-oriented design in an object-oriented system – Juan Pedro Bolívar Puente

The following two lightning talks stood out for me and are easily relatable by polyglot programmers:

• Consistently Inconsistent (Lightning Talk) – Conor Hoekstra, aka “Naming is hard”
• The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up – Tina Ulbrich, aka “KonMari-Refactoring”

Conclusion

This years Meeting C++ was a well-rounded event. I am very glad that I could attend again and got a lot of new input and impulses that will surely affect my day-to-day work – not only in C++ projects.