My talk tomorrow, and a little experimental library

Thanks to everyone who responded to the little puzzle for CppCon that I posted on the weekend. I’ll show a couple of answers in my talk tomorrow at the conference, which will be recorded and should be available on YouTube in a week or so.

My talk will focus primarily on how to use the great std:: facilities we already have in today’s C++, especially scoped lifetime, unique_ptr, and shared_ptr. Those are what you should prefer to use, in that order, to express object lifetimes in C++. In many basic situations, those tools let you express lifetime by construction with complete automation, good performance, and no extra coding work — the bee’s knees!

However, in some advanced situations, using today’s tools does still involve writing some manual code. In my talk I’ll cover how to do that by hand today.

Then at the end of the talk if time allows, I’ll offer some “very experimental” thoughts exploring whether some of that remaining manual code might be automatable, just as we automated single-owner-new/delete with unique_ptr, and automated multi-owner-new/delete-plus-reference-counting with shared_ptr and weak_ptr. To try the ideas out, I wrote a little demo library I call gcpp [GitHub]. You can read about it at that link (but please also read the disclaimers!) and I’ll present parts of it at the end of my talk tomorrow if there’s time. Like any experiment, in the worst case it won’t work out and the ideas will be abandoned; in the best case, my hope is that it may contribute some interesting ideas to develop further.

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