C++Now 2013 - trip report

published at 20.05.2013 17:26 by Jens Weller
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I did attend C++Now 2013 last week, so here is my trip report...

I've attended C++Now the second time this year, last year was my first time in Aspen. As last year I arrived early, already landing in Aspen on Friday night. Arriving a bit early gives you some time to adopt to the time change and get rid of jet lag, which did not work out this year as well as last year. A difference to last year was, that a lot of people did arrive early, so the planned dinner with a few people which I knew from last year ended up being joined by 13 people, was a really great evening.

This years sessions focused a lot on threading, which brought great talks about atomics, transactional memory or C++11 threading to the conference. I have to admit, that threading is not my main interest in C++, so not all of those talks were meant for me. But having three tracks always gives you a great choice. And also gave me the confidence that the decision to go for 3 tracks at this years Meeting C++ conference was right. There are still a few sessions I could not attend, but would like to see, for example the Concepts Lite talk, and a few others. There has been a greater variety of talks at this years conference, a few talks about Qt, 2 very good talks about boost::proto. The talks about spirit 3 and using fusion were some of my highlights.

The keynotes were this year, well, different. The first keynote about HPC and the work of National Labs was quite interesting. Chandler Carruth did do the second keynote, which was pretty much as expected, a very good talk about a topic related to compilers. The third keynote from Stanley Lippman was great and weird at the same time. He started with talking about his mice, and came back to this topic during his keynote. Which was full of anekdotes about early C++, and how he saw and sees things today. I haven't met anybody at the conference not facinated by this keynote, but also nobody that could make a sense out of it. I might watch the recording...

I had the honor of giving an evening panel together with Jon Kalb about C++ Community Work on Wednesday. Michael Wong joined us for a short introduction of isocpp.org. I then continued my talk about C++ User Groups, which focused on my motivation for being active in my user group and helping other user groups getting started, which is also the 2nd point of my talk, how to get your own C++ User Group up and running. And how Meeting C++ as a platform might be able to help you. Jon Kalb followed with his talk, about how he had changed volunteer organizations like ACCU from the inside. He also talked about how he had helped to move from boostcon to C++Now, and helped the conference in aspen to grow. One funny thing was that Jon admitted, that he thought in 2012 that I was insane planning to start my own conference from scratch. I'm sure it sounded pretty insane, and I got this year in aspen a lot of positive feedback for starting Meeting C++.

I'm yet not sure if I visit Aspen and C++Now in 2014, I'd like to go for sure, but its always a long and expensive trip if you are from Europe. This was also one of my motivations to start Meeting C++, because so many people will not get a week off to go to a conference, and simply will not get paid the long trip to aspen. Same thing with Meeting C++, I've heard several times, that 'Americans' would like to come, but their company would most likely not pay for the whole trip. So its good to know that on both continents a very good C++ conference exists.

One of the keypoints I took from the conference, is that the boost community needs you, there is a great demand for volunteers helping boost to grow and ensure its quality. At the future of boost session there has been a call for review managers, ans the queue of libraries to review is growing. So feel free to join the boost community!

Last but not least, I have to admit, that last years C++Now has been a little bit better. Not for the sessions, but for the weather. While we had a week full of sunshine last year, this time the weather was not as warm and sunny, some rain but no snow. But for anything else, Jon Kalb and the many volunteers behind him did do a great job again in organizing this great conference!

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