A lot of you have been asking me whether there will be some sort of C++ and Beyond in 2014. Also, over the past few years many of you have also asked me if there will ever be a C&B outside North America. I’m pleased to report that we are doing a ‘European Encore’ event reprising previous C&B material.

Today on the C&B blog, Scott announced that yes, there will be a “C++ and Beyond Road Show” in 2014… in Germany! Note that this is different from previous C&B’s because the purpose is to largely repeat the C&B 2013 program at an event in Europe, in order to make it accessible to people who were not able to fly to North America for previous C&Bs. So think of it as a “C&B Encore” or “C&B Greatest Hits Roadshow Edition.”

From the announcement:

You can think of this event as the C&B Road Show, because the organization is a little different from how we’ve done things in the past:

• Most of the talks will be updated versions of the presentations we gave at C&B 2013. (See the schedule here.) If you were unable to attend C&B this past December, this is your chance to see what you missed.
• A group dinner on the first day is included.
• The schedule is a bit compressed, so some aspects of previous C&Bs are not present. These include group breakfasts and evening discussion sessions.

For this event, we’ve partnered with QA Systems, the same company I’ve worked with since 1999 on technical seminars in Europe. They’ll be handling registration and all other logistical and administrative aspects of the event. Consult their web page for C&B 2014 for all the details of this event.

This will be the only C&B in 2014, so we hope to see you in Stuttgart at the end of September for the first-ever C&B in Europe!

For those of you who have attended C&B before and others who’ve been asking me whether there will be a “regular” C++ and Beyond in North America this year with new material, the answer is not this year; we don’t do a new one every year, and we’re skipping this year. If you are looking for a C++ event in North America with new material, do check out CppCon on September 7-12 in the Seattle area – I am currently planning to create some new talks for CppCon, as well as to repeat some of my C&B talks there. I hear tell that Scott and Andrei might be there too, as well as dozens and dozens of our closest speaker friends.

I’m looking forward to seeing many of you at C&B Europe and CppCon this fall!

That was fast!

Tim just added this comment on the GotW #3 Solution blog post from last year:

Are you sure you can use auto in lambda like this?
I can not compile the code and I’m pretty sure auto does not work here.

If you mean auto as a lambda parameter type, such as

[](auto& s){ use(s); }

then yes, it’s (now) legal): That’s a new feature in currently-being-finalized C++14 standard, and it’s called “generic lambdas.” It means that the compiler-generated closure object’s

operator()

is a template, so you can call the same closure object multiple times with different types and get the templated operator stamped out for each set of types it’s called with.

Major compilers are now adding support for this. As of this writing, all of GCC, Clang, and Visual C++ have implemented the basic feature and you can get it in CTP/preview/alpha releases of each, such as GCC or Clang trunk, or Visual C++ November 2013 CTP. I can’t remember offhand which of those compilers have shipped an official release since adding it (VC++ has not) but they’ll all have it in their next released versions.

By the way, isn’t it wonderful that, for the first time in the history of C++, multiple major compilers are in pretty good sync like this, both with each other and with the standard? I think that’s awesome.

If you’re at Build in San Francisco tomorrow afternoon, I invite you to swing by and spend an hour with us in session 2-661:

Modern C++: What you need to know

by Herb Sutter

Build 2014, Room 2005
2:30-3:30 pm, Thursday April 3, 2014

If you’re new to C++, this talk is aimed directly at you. I was asked to give a “foundational talk” about C++, and I decided that meant I should focus on addressing two questions that I get a lot these days:

• FAQ #1 (1-2 slides): When should I use C++ compared to another language – on all platforms in general, and on Microsoft platforms in particular?
• FAQ #2 (lots of slides): What should I know about C++ if I’m a {Java|C#|JavaScript|Python|…} developer?
  

Even if you’re a seasoned C++ developer, there are some nuggets and data points in the middle of the talk that I think you will find useful in your own work, and I hope that the talk as a whole will be helpful to you in providing a way to explain C++’s value proposition and give (or link to) an answer when someone asks you FAQ #2.

I think it will be recorded, and will post a link here when the recording is available.

I look forward to seeing many of you there tomorrow afternoon.