Good news: due to the large number of submissions (we got over 140), the conference will have 6 tracks instead of the planned 5. This means there will be approximately 100 talks, and that’s not counting keynotes, plenary sessions, and lightning talks (more on those soon). As far as we know no other conference has ever had this number of C++-related presentations which will make CppCon 2014 the biggest event in the history of the language.

Understandably, many of you would like to see the conference program before registering. However, due to a greater than expected number of submissions, the final program is still some weeks away. So to help you make up your mind (or convince your boss) we are going to start publishing the talks as they are accepted. So here is the first chunk (summary first, abstracts following):

Scott Meyers: “Type Deduction and Why You Care”

John JT Thomas: “Embarcadero Case Study: Bringing CLANG/LLVM to Windows”

Rachel Cheng, Michael VanLoon: “Boost: A Bridge from C++98 to C++11; An Introduction to Using More Boost”

Titus Winters: “The Philosophy of Google’s C++ Code”

James McNellis: “Unicode in C++”

Scott Meyers: “Type Deduction and Why You Care“

C++98 had template type deduction, and it worked so intuitively, there was little need to understand what took place under the covers. C++11 extends type deduction to include universal references, applies it to auto variables and lambda expressions, then throws in a special auto-only deduction rule. C++14 pushes the boundary further, adding two forms of function return type deduction (auto and decltype(auto)) for arbitrary functions and offering auto parameters for lambdas. The result is that what could be treated as a black box in C++98 has become a topic that practicing C++ developers really need to understand. This talk will give you the information you need to do that.

Speaker’s bio: Scott Meyers is one of the world’s foremost experts on C++ software development. He wrote the best-selling Effective C++ series (Effective C++, More Effective C++, and Effective STL) and is also author of Overview of the New C++ (C++11/14) and Effective C++ in an Embedded Environment.

John JT Thomas: “Embarcadero Case Study: Bringing CLANG/LLVM to Windows“

CLANG/LLVM delivers a highly conforming C++ compiler and architecture for targeting multiple CPUs, and, as such, has seen success in iOS and other operating systems. Embarcadero has successfully delivered the first commercial compiler for Windows based on CLANG/LLVM. This session describes the benefits of CLANG/LLVM as well as the challenges in bringing it to the Windows operating system. Particular emphasis is placed on the managing the changes in CLANG as well as the additional features added to enable Windows development.

Speaker’s bio: John “JT” Thomas, Director of Product Management at Embarcadero Technologies, has more than 15 years of product management and product development experience including hands-on experience with the early versions of Delphi and C++Builder at Borland Software. While at Borland he was a delegate on the ANSI/ISO C++ standards committee. He earned his Computer Science degree from University of California, Santa Cruz and his MBA and MSE from San Jose State University.

Rachel Cheng and Michael VanLoon: “Boost: A Bridge from C++98 to C++11; An Introduction to Using More Boost“

Part one is for those who are stuck with a C++98/03 compiler, but are interested in using more advanced C++11-like strategies. We will discuss some of the differences between C++98 and C++11 while demonstrating how strategic use of Boost libraries can bridge the gap, allowing more modern programming paradigms in many cases. Part two is a deeper dive into some interesting Boost libraries for those who may be new to Boost usage. We will explore how C++98 and C++11 can be enhanced and extended by the additional richness of Boost libraries. We will use as example some of the boost libraries used in the F5 Networks code base. If there is time leftover, we will discuss our experience upgrading GCC.

Speakers’ bio: Rachel Cheng is a recent graduate from The Evergreen State College is currently employed at F5 Networks. Michael VanLoon is a Senior Software Engineer at F5 Networks, is a member of the Northwest C++ Users group, and has attended ISO C++ Standards Committee meetings. He has benefited from time at Microsoft, Yahoo!, and VMware, among others, before joining F5. He is fascinated with crafting code and is dismayed at code that falls short of its potential.

Titus Winters: “The Philosophy of Google’s C++ Code“

The Google C++ Style Guide is a fairly popular guide for C++ coding practices, both at Google and externally, but some of its recommendations often seem dated and have created controversy and perceived tension with more modern C++ In this talk we will focus on the core philosophies underlying that guide, ranging from the common (be consistent) to the unusual (leave an explicit trace for the reader), and debunk the idea that Google’s C++ is anything less than modern. We’ll discuss how these core ideas inform contentious rules like “No non-const references” and “Don’t use exceptions,” and how the application of those rules has worked for us in practice, both as developers and reliability engineers (SREs).

Speaker’s bio: Titus Winters has spent the past three years working on Google’s core C++ libraries. He’s particularly interested in issues of large scale software engineering and codebase maintenance: how do we keep a codebase of over 100M lines of code consistent and flexible for the next decade? Along the way he has helped Google teams pioneer techniques to perform automated code transformations on a massive scale, and helps maintain the Google C++ Style Guide.

James McNellis: “Unicode in C++“

In some programming languages, text processing is easy. Unfortunately, C++ is not one of those languages. C++ lacks good, built-in support for Unicode, though the situation is starting to improve. This session will begin with a brief overview of text encodings, and an introduction to Unicode and the various Unicode encodings. We’ll look at the woeful state of Unicode support in C++98 (or, really, lack thereof), then take a look at the improvements that were made in C++11 and other improvements that have recently been proposed for standardization. We’ll finish up with a discussion of several libraries designed to make it easier to work with Unicode in C++, including the widely-used, open-source International Components for Unicode (ICU) library.

Speaker’s bio: James McNellis is a senior engineer on the Microsoft Visual C++ team, where he is responsible for the Visual C++ C Runtime (CRT) and C Standard Library implementation. He was previously a member of the Microsoft Expression Blend team, developing the XAML designer tools for Windows 8 apps. Prior to joining Microsoft in 2010, he spent several years working on real-time 3-D simulation and robotics projects in the defense industry. James is a prolific contributor on the Stack Overflow programming Q&A website and occasionally writes for the Visual C++ Team Blog.