CppCon 2019

These days everyone talks about conforming and portable C++. Compiler vendors celebrate increasing conformance. Committee agents blind us with new shiny toys coming to the language. But there is a darker side to C++. A C++ you are not supposed to know about.

What if I told you there was more to C++ than what the agents of The Committee want us to believe? Over decades programmers all around the world have added features to the language in form of compiler extensions that let us do even greater things. Some are completely new, and some are lifted from C to C++ to allow some interesting, and sometimes more efficient, application.

We will see how statements can become expressions, how "goto" with extra superpowers can make your programs faster, and why there exists an operator named after a famous rock star. These are just a few examples of what to expect as listing any more would draw unwanted attention from The Committee. Unfortunately, because these extensions are not part of ISO C++, using any of them comes at the expense of portability. Or does it?