CppCon 2025

C++ is a very versatile language for making APIs. This talk examines some API techniques -- mechanical and structural -- that I've introduced to production libraries, based on reviewing code where folks were trying to achieve their goals, but with suboptimal formulations. C++ was able to do better, albeit sometimes in non-obvious ways.

We'll look at real code: dealing with the complexities of common cross-cutting concerns like IO, concurrency, logging, handling time, or dealing with hardware quirks. API patterns that enable our teams to write code that really achieves zero-cost abstraction at the scale of subsystems. Moving code reviews beyond the "easy mode" recommendations of using algorithms over raw loops, to cultivating a sensibility for code that is more declarative, correct by construction, high performing, and obvious in intent.

More tools in the toolbox means we can solve the important problems more easily and cleanly.