CppCon 2019

For the past several years, we have been working with Herb Sutter on C++ language support for Metaclassses. In order to implement this feature, we’ve had to invent a myriad of new language features, including scalable features for static reflection, the ability to inject partial definitions classes, namespaces, and functions, and the ability to clone and inject (with modifications) existing declarations. All of these capabilities are a precursor to supporting metaclasses.

In this talk, we present the background of this work, the constraints under which the features were designed, and the current status of our work. We will discuss many of the new language features that we’ve created, by giving examples to show how they might be used. Finally, we’ll explain how these metaprogramming features support metaclasses and explain how metaclasses can be used as a new kind of tool for library developers.