C++Now

C++Now
Name	C++Now
Status	Active
Genre	Programming conference
Frequency	Annual
Location	Aspen, Colorado
Country	United States
First	2010
Organizer	BoostPro Computing

C++Now

C++Now is an annual technical conference focused on the C++ programming language, held in Aspen, Colorado, that brings together practitioners, researchers, and standards contributors. The event emphasizes modern C++11, C++14, C++17, C++20, C++23 features, performance engineering, and tooling, attracting participants from industry and academia. Attendees include members of standards bodies, open-source projects, and corporations engaged in systems, embedded, and high-performance computing.

Overview

C++Now serves as a forum linking implementers, standards committee delegates, library authors, and corporate engineers such as representatives from Microsoft Corporation, Google LLC, Facebook, Inc., Apple Inc., Amazon.com, Inc., Intel Corporation, IBM, NVIDIA Corporation, ARM Ltd., Red Hat, Oracle Corporation, AMD, Siemens AG, SiFive, Tesla, Inc., Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon Technologies, Bloomberg L.P., Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Spotify, Netflix, Inc., Adobe Inc., SAP SE, Atlassian, Palantir Technologies, Dropbox, Inc., Salesforce, Slack Technologies and academic institutions such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, University of Cambridge, ETH Zurich, University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, Carnegie Mellon University, University of California, Berkeley, Princeton University, University of Oxford, University of Toronto, University of Waterloo, Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Michigan, Harvard University, Cornell University, Imperial College London, TU Delft, Tsinghua University, Peking University, Seoul National University, Kyoto University, University of Tokyo, University of Sydney, and University of British Columbia.

History

The conference traces its origins to practitioner gatherings and workshops inspired by events like CppCon, BoostCon, ACCU, Meeting C++, ACM SIGPLAN, IEEE Software, Embedded Systems Conference, PyCon, LinuxCon, USENIX Annual Technical Conference, Alloy.org and regional meetups. Early organizers included contributors to the ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 22 process, members of the ISO C++ committee, and maintainers of projects such as Boost (C++ libraries), LLVM, Clang, GCC, libstdc++, Microsoft Visual C++, libc++, and Dinkumware. Over successive years, speakers have included committee chairs, library authors, and toolchain engineers who also participate in initiatives at GitHub, GitLab, Mozilla Foundation, Apache Software Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, Khronos Group, W3C, IETF, ITU, European Organisation for Nuclear Research, NASA, DARPA, NSA, Google Summer of Code, Linux Foundation, Open Source Initiative, and Mozilla Developer Network.

Conference Program and Topics

Program tracks cover modern language features, metaprogramming, concurrency, parallelism, and performance analysis, drawing on techniques from practitioners involved with OpenMP, MPI, CUDA, OpenCL, SYCL, Vulkan, DirectX, POSIX, Linux kernel, Windows NT, macOS, iOS, Android (operating system), FreeRTOS, QNX, Zephyr Project, Intel Threading Building Blocks, Boost.Asio, Boost.Spirit, Boost.Hana, Range-v3, fmt (library), spdlog, Google Test, Catch2, CMake, Meson, Bazel (software), Make (software), Ninja (build system), Visual Studio, Xcode, Clang-Tidy, Sanitizers, AddressSanitizer, UBSan, Valgrind, gdb, lldb, perf (Linux), Intel VTune, AMD uProf, Google Benchmark, PAPI, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Kubernetes, Docker (software), Ansible, Puppet (software), Chef (software), and Terraform (software). Tutorials often address template metaprogramming, constexpr programming, coroutines, modules, reflections, concepts, and library design.

Speakers and Community

Speakers have included prominent implementers, standards committee members, and authors associated with works like The C++ Programming Language, Effective Modern C++, A Tour of C++, C++ Primer, Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++, Modern C++ Design, C++ Templates: The Complete Guide, Exceptional C++, More Exceptional C++, Elements of Programming, and contributors recognizable from organizations such as ISO, IEEE, ACM, BoostPro, Herb Sutter, Bjarne Stroustrup, Andrei Alexandrescu, Scott Meyers, Nicolai Josuttis, Sean Parent, Stroustrup's research group, Walter E. Brown, David Abrahams, Alexandrescu group, Anthony Williams, Mateusz Pusz, Corentin Jabot, Peter Dimov, Niall Douglas, Casey Carter, Jason Turner, Chandler Carruth, Krzysztof Ostrowski, Zoltan Herczeg, Jonathan Boccara, Howard Hinnant, Anthony Williams (author), Vittorio Romeo, Petr Stehlík, Nick Desaulniers, Toby Mao, Simon Brand, James McNellis, Stephen Dewhurst, Björn Fahller, Andreas Fertig, Brendan Eich, Linus Torvalds, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Rob Pike, Richard M. Stallman, Bjarne Stroustrup (repeated).

Awards and Scholarships

The event offers travel grants, scholarships, and recognition programs supported by corporate sponsors and foundations such as Google Summer of Code, The IEEE Foundation, Linux Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, ACM SIGPLAN, Python Software Foundation, Microsoft Philanthropies, Intel Foundation, NVIDIA Foundation, Oracle Education Foundation, ARM Education Grants, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Eclipse Foundation, and private donors. Awards often recognize contributions to open-source libraries, tooling, and education with grants named for figures associated with programming history such as Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing, Grace Hopper, John von Neumann, Claude Shannon, Donald Knuth, Ken Thompson (repeated), Dennis Ritchie (repeated), and organizations like ACM, IEEE Computer Society, Open Source Initiative (repeated).

Impact and Contributions to C++

C++Now has influenced library adoption, toolchain improvements, and standards discussions, informing implementations in GCC (GNU Compiler Collection), LLVM Project, Clang (compiler), Microsoft Visual C++, libstdc++, libc++ (LLVM) and spurring work on proposals for ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 22/WG21. Its community contributions appear in repositories on GitHub (company), GitLab (company), and SourceForge and intersect with projects like Boost (C++ libraries) (repeated), Folklore projects, Range-v3 (repeated), Abseil, Folly (Facebook), Qt (software), wxWidgets, POCO C++ Libraries, OpenCV, Eigen (software), Armadillo (C++ linear algebra library), TensorFlow, PyTorch, ONNX, ROCm, CUDA Toolkit, and performance stacks used at CERN, NASA (repeated), European Space Agency, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories.

Category:Computer conferences