CppCon 2025

It’s Saturday morning, the day after CppCon 2025 finished, and I’m preparing to get on the plane back home to Chicago.

It’s been a busy week: I somewhat overcommitted myself and prepared and presented three talks, and participated in two panels. I had something to present or do every day but Thursday.

I’m just taking stock: it’s been a few years since I’ve been at CppCon, and I had a fantastic time. I’ve missed catching up with so many of my C++ pals.

As always the talks I saw were excellent, and got me excited about the future of C++. In particular Barry Revzin’s talk on Reflection (and Herb Sutter’s later keynote covering similar topics) was really inspiring. Other gems of the conference included:

• Daisy Hollman’s AI talk - bringing us up to date with what’s available in the AI world for C++, and what we might see soon
• Egor Suvorov’s floating point pitfall talk
• Steve Downey taught us about upcoming std::optional<T&> (can’t wait for this feature)
• Nevin Liber’s heartfelt personal retrospective on 15 years of C++ standardization work
• Andy Soffer showed how Bronto could be the future of refactoring C++
• Jason Turner’s talks (one on AI best practices, another on implicit conversions)
• Seeing Ben McMorran live code a Compiler Explorer MCP (!)
• Pixar’s great talk on their open source work (not recorded either; you had to just be there! A hidden gem)
• Vittorio’s brilliant DoD keynote. A really slick presentation, presented so well with great visualisations
• Daniel Lemire and Francisco Geiman Thiesen’s talk on reflection-based JSON parsing at speed
• Madeline Schneider’s talk unpacking how USB works and how to write C++ to model it
• Michael Caisse introduced us to a declarative way of specifying and accessing hardware registers
• Ben Deane’s logging library talk (sadly also not recorded!)

Matt and Laurie Kirk
Laurie being very kind and letting me take a selfie

Of course, the “hallway track” (informally chatting with folks as we mill around) was great too. I met lots of new friends, and caught up with old acquaintances too. And bumped into (and got a selfie with) Laurie Kirk aka LaurieWired!

Some plonker on stage banging on about something C++ and assembly
No doubt saying something deep and thought-provoking. Or just making a poor joke

My own talks went pretty well: I was able to talk about emulators, introduce people to some of the more esoteric features of Compiler Explorer, and at the end got a chance to wax a bit on how important assembly is to C++.

It’s been a blast: see you next year CppCon!