NDC TechTown in Konsgberg, Norway 2024

In early September, we attended NDC TechTown for the second year in a row. NDC TechTown is a C, C++, Embedded Software Conference for Product Development set in the idyllic countryside town of Kongsberg, Norway.

think-cell founder Arno Schoedl presented his talk “Why Iterators Got It All Wrong — and what we should use instead”. The audience learned that the iterator concept in the C++ standard library is a flawed concept. It really represents two very different things that we should distinguish: Elements and borders between elements. With the new C++ transform, filter and reverse ranges, this distinction is important in practice.

Our Software Engineer Jonathan Müller presented his talk “An (In-)Complete Guide to C++ Object Lifetimes”. In this talk the audience learned about the rules for object creation and destruction, and when it's safe to form pointers and references to object. They also learned about advanced functions like std::launder, std::bit_cast, and std::start_lifetime_as.

Here's what Jonathan had to say about the conference:

"I’ve attended NDC TechTown for the second time. For a conference that seems to attract more regional attendees, I was impressed by the number of well-known international speakers in the line up! Bryce Adelstein Lelbach gave an inspiring talk about the future of C++, Kate Gregory gave a reprise of her classic “Naming is hard” lecture, Chandler Carruth showcased an impressive demo of the carbon compiler (> 1 million lines per second compilation speed!), Jason Turner talked about constexpr in C++23, and Sean Parent gave the closing keynote about local reasoning. If you haven’t attended NDC TechTown, you should definitely consider going there next year."

With that said, we're looking forward to being back again next year!