Meeting C++ 2026 - Contracts and hardened libraries - a bright future for C++ safety?

Ivan Čukić

On Day 1 at 14:30 (CET/Berlin) in Track A [Saphir Room and online]

Contracts are in. Finally!

We now have a native language facility that allows us to specify preconditions, postconditions and invariants directly as C++ code instead of writing them as comments, or using macros.

We also have hardened standard library implementations that eliminate whole classes of common software vulnerabilities.

While these are quite useful, all the checks are performed at runtime and the reaction mechanism to an unsatisfied condition is quite crude. Useful to avoid vulnerability exploits, but not as useful to normal functioning of the program.

We've been taught for ages that catching errors at compile-time is better than catching them during runtime. Can we detect contract violations even before they happen?

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