C++ on Sea in Kent, UK 2024

C++ On Sea took place at the start of July, and we were the proud video sponsor of the conference again this year. Jonathan Müller and Sebastian Theophil from our Engineering team presented their talks at the event. Here is what Jonathan had to to say:

"C++ on Sea was held for the fourth time in Folkestone in a venue with beautiful views over the English Channel. I was honoured to be able to give two talks there. The first, “An (In-)complete guide to C++ object lifetimes” gave a detailed description about object creation and destruction, std::launder, std::start_lifetime_as, and all the rules around them. My second, “Overengineering max(a, b): Mixed comparison functions, common references, and Rust’s lifetime annotations” is about a fundamental problem with functions that want to take rvalue references as inputs and later return them. When composing such functions, it is very easy to accidentally return a dangling reference to an intermediate temporary. Solving this properly leads to lots of complexity that I went over in the talk.

My colleague Sebastian Theophil also gave a talk about “Reusable code, reusable data structures” where he talks about the various techniques C++ provides to fight code repetition using templates, variants, inheritance, and type erasure. Another talk I want to recommend Cassio Neri’s “A new dragon in the den: fast conversion from floating-point numbers” about a new algorithm to convert a float to a string. For the first time, I was able to understand one of those algorithms! I very much look forward to hopefully attend the conference again next year."

To watch these talks (and the rest of the conference talks), head over to the YouTube channel where all videos will be available.