C++ and Beyond 2012: Aug 5-8, Asheville, NC, USA

February and March have been killer busy, so that I forgot to repeat an important announcement here: registration is open for C++ and Beyond 2012! I’m looking forward to teaching for three days again with Scott Meyers and Andrei Alexandrescu at one of the top C++ conference highlights of the year.

This year, C&B will be held on August 5-8 in beautiful Asheville, North Carolina, USA. Registration is limited to 120 people, and now that I’m a month late in repeating this announcement I see that it’s already over 25% booked… seats are going faster than in either of the previous years, but fortunately there are still lots of spaces available as I write this.

This is becoming yet another big year for C++ in the industry, as C++ use and interest continues to surge and even the ISO C++ committee isn’t slowing down after delivering C++11 but is actually accelerating, ramping up work for the next round on concurrency/parallelism, networking, filesystem, and other short-term topics of interest as mentioned in my trip report. As usual, C++ and Beyond will feature the most important material you can use today and information about what to expect that’s coming down the pike short-term tomorrow.

Only two of the session descriptions have been posted so far, but they’re already deeply interesting and brand-new material never presented before – by us or by anyone, as far as I’m aware. Here they are…

1. “Universal References in C++11” (brand-new talk by Scott Meyers)

Scott’s first-announced talk on “Universal References in C++11” targets a key underpinning of two C++11 marquee features – move semantics and perfect forwarding. I’ve seen drafts of the material, and this is going to be a deeply illuminating talk that covers not only the “what” and “how” of thinking about and effectively using T&& declarations in C++, but also the “why” – the thinking behind the language rules that helps us to understand the reasons why this important C++11 feature was designed the way it is, and what other topics and techniques it affects.

2. “You Don’t Know [keyword] and [keyword]” (brand-new talk by Herb Sutter)

Yes, the title really is “You Don’t Know [keyword] and [keyword],” at least for now. Here’s the description I just posted:

I plan to give a brand-new talk for the first time at C&B, but I’m conflicted regarding what to say about it here because it’s recently been a bit of a startling realization to me about C++11, and I think it may be a bit startling for others too. I don’t want to be a tease, but I also want to save it as a surprise for C&B itself.

In the meantime, here’s a teaser…

In addition to the many new C++11 features that everyone’s listing, it has dawned on me over the winter that there’s actually another major change that isn’t being talked about anywhere, or even being listed as a change in C++11 at all as far as I know, because I and other key experts and committee members I’ve asked didn’t fully realize that we altered the basic meaning of not one but two fundamental keywords in C++. It’s a change that has profound consequences, that rewrites and/or invalidates several pieces of pre-C++11 design guidance, and that’s directly related to writing solid code in a concurrent and parallel world. This isn’t just an academic change, either – everyone is going to have to learn and apply the new C++11 guidance that we’ll cover in this session.

I plan to talk about it first at C&B, in a session tentatively titled as above – I’ll fill in the keywords later. You may already guess a few keyword candidates based on the description above, and here’s a final hint: You’ll hardly find two C++ keywords that are older, or whose meanings are more changed from C++98 to C++11. (No, they aren’t auto and register.)

I hope you can come, and I’m looking forward to seeing many of you in Asheville this summer.