Yesterday’s talk video posted: Reflection — C++’s decade-defining rocket engine

My CppCon keynote video is now online. Thanks to Bash Films for turning around the keynotes in under 24 hours!

C++ has just reached a true watershed moment: Barely three months ago, at our Sofia meeting, static reflection became part of draft standard C++. This talk is entirely devoted to showing example after example of how it works in C++26 and planned extensions beyond that, and how it will dramatically alter the trajectory of C++ — and possibly also of other languages. Thanks again to Max Sagebaum for coming on stage and explaining automatic differentiation, including his world’s-first C++ (via cppfront) autodiff implementation using reflection!

I hope you enjoy the talk and live demos, and find it useful.

Here is a copy of the talk abstract…

In June 2025, C++ crossed a Rubicon: it handed us the keys to its own machinery. For the first time, C++ can describe itself—and generate more. The first compile-time reflection features in draft C++26 mark the most transformative turning point in our language’s history by giving us the most powerful new engine for expressing efficient abstractions that C++ has ever had, and we’ll need the next decade to discover what this rocket can do.

This session is a high-velocity tour through what reflection enables today in C++26, and what it will enable next. We’ll start with live compiler demos (Godbolt, of course) to show how much the initial C++26 feature set can already do. Then we’ll jump a few years ahead, using Dan Katz’s Clang extensions, Daveed Vandevoorde’s EDG extensions, and my own cppfront reflection implementation to preview future capabilities that could reshape not just C++, but the way we think about programming itself.

We’ll see how reflection can simplify C++’s future evolution by reducing the need for as many bespoke new language features, since many can now be expressed as reusable compile-time libraries—faster to design, easier to test, and portable from day one. We’ll even glimpse how it might solve a problem that has long eluded the entire software industry, in a way that benefits every language.

The point of this talk isn’t to immediately grok any given technique or example. The takeaway is bigger: to leave all of us dizzy from the sheer volume of different examples, asking again and again, “Wait, we can do that now?!”—to fire up our imaginations to discover and develop this enormous new frontier together, and chart the strange new worlds C++ reflection has just opened for us to explore.

Reflection has arrived, more is coming, and the frontier is open. Let’s go.

Speaking at University of Waterloo on January 15

Next week, on January 15, I’ll be speaking at the University of Waterloo, my alma mater. There’ll be a tech talk on key developments in C++ and why I think the language’s future over the next decade will be exciting, with lots of time allocated to a “fireside chat / interview” session for Q&A. The session is hosted by Waterloo’s Women in Computer Science (WiCS) group, and dinner and swag by Citadel Securities, where I work.

This talk is open to Waterloo students only (registration required). The organizers are arranging an option to watch remotely for the half of you who are away from campus on your co-op work terms right now — I vividly remember those! Co-op is a great experience.

I look forward to meeting many current students next week, and comparing notes about co-op work terms, pink ties (I still have mine) and MathSoc and C&D food (if Math is your faculty), WATSFIC, and “Water^∞loo” jokes (I realize doing this in January is tempting the weather/travel gods, but I do know how to drive in snow…).

My code::dive talk video is available: New Q&A

Two weeks ago, Bjarne and I and lots of ISO committee members had a blast at the code::dive C++ conference held on November 25, just two days after the end of the Wrocław ISO C++ meeting. Thanks again to Nokia for hosting the ISO meeting, and for inviting us all to speak at their conference! My talk was an updated-and-shortened version of my CppCon keynote (which I also gave at Meeting C++; I’ll post a link to that video too once it’s posted):

If you already saw the CppCon talk, you can skip to these “new parts at the end” where the Q&A got into very interesting topics:

Finally, I’m glad I got a chance to give this last answer to cap things off, and thanks again for the audience question that led to it:

57:55 Why I think the most impactful way I can contribute toward improving our society is through improving existing C++ code (** transcript at bottom of this post)

That morning, on our route while traveling from the hotel to the conference site, at one point we noticed that up ahead there was a long line of people all down the length of a block and wrapped around the corner. It took me a few beats to realize that was where we were going, and those were the people still waiting to get in to the conference (at that time there were already over 1,000 people inside the building). Here’s one photo that appeared in the local news showing part of the queue:

In all, I’m told 1,800 people attended on-site, and 8,000 attended online. Thank you again to our Nokia hosts for hosting the ISO C++ meeting and inviting us to code::dive, and thank you to all the C++ developers (and, I’m sure, a few C++-curious) who came from Poland and beyond to spend a day together talking about our favorite programming language!

(*) Here’s a transcript of what I said in that closing summary:

… Reflection and safety improvements as what I see are the two big drivers of our next decade of C++.

So I’m excited about C++. I really think that this was a turning point year, because we’ve been talking about safety for a decade, the Core Guidelines are a decade old, we’ve been talking about reflection for 20 years in the C++ committee — but this is the year that it’s starting to get real. This is the year we put erroneous behavior [in] and eliminated uninitialized locals in the standard, this is the year that we design-approved reflection for the standard — both for C++26 and hopefully they’ll both get in. We are starting to finally see these proposals land, and this is going to create a beautiful new decade, open up a new fresh era of C++. Bjarne [….] when C++11 came out, he said, you know, there’s been so many usability improvements here that C++11, even though it’s fully compatible with C++98, it feels like a new language. I think we’re about to do that again, and to make C++26 feel like a new language. And then just as we built on C++11 and finished it with C++14, 17, 20, the same thing with this generation. That’s how I view it. I’m very hopeful for a bright future for C++. Our language and our community continues to grow, and it’s great to see us addressing the problems we most need to address, so we have an answer for safety, we have an answer for simpler build systems and reducing the number of side languages to make C++ work in practice. And I’m looking forward to the ride for the next decade and more.

And at the end of the Q&A, the final part of my answer about why I’m focused on C++ rather than other efforts:

Why am I spending all this time in ISO C++? Not just because I’m some C++-lover on a fanatical level — you may accuse me of that too — but it’s just because I want to have an impact. I’m a user of this world’s society and civilization. I use this world’s banking system. I rely on this world’s hospital system. I rely on this world’s power grid. And darnit I don’t want that compromised, I want to harden it against attack. And if I put all my energy into some new programming language, I will have some impact, but it’s going to be much smaller because I can only write so much new code. If I can find a way to just recompile — that’s why you keep hearing me say that — to just recompile the billions of lines of C++ code that exist today, and make them even 10% safer, and I hope to make them much more than that safer, I will have had an outsized effect on securing our civilization. And I don’t mean to speak too grandiosely, but look at all the C++ code that needs fixing. If you can find a way to do that, it will have an outsized impact and benefit to society. And that’s why I think it’s important, because C++ is important — and not leaving all that code behind, helping that code too as well as new code, I think is super important, and that’s kind of my motivation.

A new chapter, and thoughts on a pivotal year for C++

Starting today I’m excited to be working on a new team, with my C++ standards and community roles unchanged. I also wanted to write a few words about why I’m excited about continuing to invest my time heavily in C++’s standardization and evolution especially now, because I think 2024 has been a pivotal year for C++ — and so this has turned into a bit of an early “year-end C++ retrospective” post too.

It’s been a blast to be on the Microsoft Visual C++ compiler team for over 22 years! The time has flown by because the people and the challenges have always been world-class. An underappreciated benefit of being on a team that owns a foundational technology (like a major C++ compiler) is that you often don’t have to change teams to find interesting projects, because new interesting projects need compiler support and so tend to come to you. That’s been a real privilege, and why I stuck around way longer than any other job I’ve held. Now I am finally going to switch to a new job, but I’ll continue to cheer my colleagues on as a happy MSVC user on my own projects, consuming all the cool things they’re going to do next!

Today I’m thrilled to start at Citadel Securities, a firm that “combines deep trading acumen with leading-edge analytics and technology to deliver liquidity to some of the world’s most important markets, retail brokerages, and financial institutions.” I’ve known folks at CitSec for many years now (including some who participate in WG 21) and have long known it to be a great organization with some of the brightest minds in engineering and beyond. Now I’m looking forward to helping to drive CitSec’s internal C++ training initiatives, advise on technical strategy, share things I’ve learned along the way about sound design for both usability and pragmatic adoptability, and mentor a new set of talented folks there to not only take their own skilled next steps but also to themselves become mentors to others in turn. I think a continuous growth and learning culture like I’ve seen at CitSec consistently for over a dozen years is one of the most important qualities a company can have, because if you have that you can always grow all the other things you need, including as demands evolve over time. But maybe most of all I’m looking forward to learning a lot myself as I dive back into the world of finance — finance is where I started my junior career in the 80s and 90s, and I’m sure I’ll learn a ton in CitSec’s diverse set of 21^st-century businesses that encounter interesting, leading-edge technical challenges every day that go well beyond the ones I encountered back in the 20^th.

My other C++ community roles are unchanged — I’m continuing my current term as chair of the ISO C++ committee, I’m continuing as chair of the Standard C++ Foundation, and especially I’m continuing to work heavily on ISO C++ evolution (I have eight papers in the current mailing for this month’s Wrocław meeting!) including supporting those with cppfront prototype implementations. I meant it when I said in my CppCon talk that C++’s next decade will be dominated by reflection and safety improvements, and that C++26 really is shaping up to be the most impactful release since C++11 that started a new era of C++; it’s an exciting time for C++ and I plan to keep spending a lot of time contributing to C++26 and beyond.

Drilling down a little: Why is 2024 a pivotal year for C++? Because for the first time in 2024 the ISO committee has started adopting (or is on track to soon adopt) serious safety and reflection improvements into the draft C++ standard, and that’s a big turning point:

For safety: With uninitialized local variables no longer being undefined behavior (UB) in C++26 as of March 2024, C++ is taking a first serious step to really removing safety-related UB, and achieve the ‘holy grail’ of an easy adoption story: “Just recompile your existing code with a C++26 compiler, with zero manual code changes, and it’s safer with less UB.” This month, I’m following up on that proposing P3436R1, a strategy for how we could remove all safety-related UB by default from C++ — something that I’m pretty sure a lot of folks can’t imagine C++ could ever do while still remaining true to what makes C++ be C++, but that in fact C++ has already been doing for years in constexpr code! The idea I’m proposing is to remove the same cases of UB we already do in constexpr code also at execution time, in one of two ways for each case: when it’s efficient enough, eliminate that case universally the same as we just did for uninitialized locals; otherwise, leverage the great ideas in the Profiles proposals as a way to opt in/out of that case (see P3436 for details). If the committee likes the idea enough to encourage me to go do more work to flesh it out, over the winter I’ll invest the time to expand the paper into a complete catalog of safety-related UB with a per-case proposal to eliminate that UB at execution time. If we can really achieve a future C++ where you can “just recompile your existing code with safety Profiles enabled, and it’s safer with zero safety-related UB,” that would be a huge step forward. (Of course, some Profiles rules will require code changes to get the full safety benefits; see the details in section 2 of my supporting Profiles paper.)
For reflection: Starting with P2996R7 whose language part was design-approved for C++26 in June 2024, we can lay a foundation to then build on with follow-on papers like P3294R2 and P3437R1 to add generation and more features. As I demonstrated with examples in the above-linked CppCon talk, reflection (including generation) will be a game-changer that I believe will dominate the next decade of C++ as we build it out in the standard and learn to use it in the global C++ community. I’m working with P2996/P3294 prototypes and my own cppfront compiler to help gather usability experience, and I’m contributing my papers like P0707R5 and P3437R1 as companion/supporting papers to those core proposals to try to help them progress.

As Bjarne Stroustrup famously said, “C++11 [felt] like a new language,” starting a new “modern” C++ style featuring auto and lambdas and standard safe smart pointers and range-for and move semantics and constexpr compile-time code, that we completed and built on over the next decade with C++14/17/20/23. (And don’t forget that C++11’s move semantics already delivered the ideal adoption story of “just recompile your existing code with a C++11 compiler, with zero manual code changes, and it’s faster.”) Since 2011 until now, “modern C++” has pretty much meant “C++ since C++11” because C++11 made that much of a difference in how C++ worked and felt.

Now I think C++26 is setting the stage to do that again for a second time: Our next major era of what “modern C++” will mean will be characterized by having safety by default and first-class support for reflection-based generative compile-time libraries. Needless to say, this is a group effort that is accomplished only by an amazing set of C++ pros from dozens of countries, including the authors of the above papers but also many hundreds of other experts who help design and review features. To all of those experts: Again, thank you! I’ll keep trying to contribute what I can too, to help ship C++26 with its “version 1” of a set of these major new foundational tools and to continue to add to that foundation further in the coming years as we all learn to use the new features to make our code safer and simpler.

C++ is critically important to our society, and is right now actively flourishing. C++ is essential not only at Citadel Securities itself, but throughout capital markets and the financial industry… and even that is itself just one of the critical sectors of our civilization that heavily depend on C++ code and will for the foreseeable future. I’m thrilled that CitSec’s leadership shares my view of that, and my same goals for continuing to evolve ISO C++ to make it better, especially when it comes to increasing safety and usability to harden our society’s key infrastructure (including our markets) and to make C++ even easier to use and more expressive. I’m excited to see what the coming decade of C++ brings… 2024 really has shaped up to be a pivotal year for C++ evolution, and I can’t wait to see where the ride takes us next.