C&B ended last night, and Herb, Andrei, and I have already started thinking about how we’ll tinker with the content and format for the December “Encore” presentation.  As is typically the case for version 1.1 releases, we’ll file down a few rough edges we found in version 1.0, but being developers at heart, we’re also thinking of sneaking in a couple of new (albeit minor) features.  We’ll post details when they’re available.

In the meantime, here are a few of my personal highlights from C&B:

  • Herb demonstrating that C++0x lambdas can be used in a lot more ways than I’d considered.  I’ve spent a fair amount of time working with lambdas (one of my favorite new features in C++0x), so I’d  already considered quite a few.
  • Andrei’s remarking that of the 6 hours 15 minutes it took him to process 6 million HTML files for one of his Facebook projects, 6 hours were spent doing nothing but opening and closing the files.  He still managed to reduce his total processing time to 1 hour and 14 minutes.
  • Attendee questions that led me to find out that (1) you can initialize a std::string with false (!) and (2) doing so calls the constructor taking a pointer (!!); (draft) C++0x allows calls to move constructors to be elided under the same conditions as copy constructor calls; and CPU caches sometimes operate on virtual addresses and sometimes on real addresses, typically depending on the speed of the cache.
  • The realization, once again, that no matter how varied the backgrounds and professional responsibilities of C++ developers, two things you can rely on are (1) they care about performance and (2) they can’t get enough of it.
  • Falling asleep to the sound of a crackling fire is just as pleasant now as it was when I went camping as a kid, except that doing so while sleeping in a bed is a lot more comfortable. (All rooms at the Salish Lodge have wood-burning fireplaces.)
  • Contrary to our intuition, C&B attendees didn’t tend to come from places geographically close to the location of the event (Snoqualmie, Washington).  In fact, we had more people from other continents than from the state of Washington!  Here’s a map showing where attendees came from.  The sizes of the circles correspond to the number of attendees from that location:

Next week, all attendees of C&B will get a link to an updated version of the PDF course materials, and, because we expect to find a few more things we can improve during our December presentation, we’ll also send October participants a link to the final C++ & Beyond 2010 presentation materials after the December event is over.   This way, not only do December participants benefit from the improvements we made based on our October experience, October attendees will have access to the things we revise based on what happens in December.

We’ve set up the registration page for the December “Encore” presentation to show the number of remaining slots, so you can see how quickly you need to sign up if you’d like to attend.  Currently there are 25 open slots (there were 26 when I started this blog post), but, based on the evaluations and other feedback we got from this week’s attendees, we suspect that many of this week’s participants will return to their workplaces and encourage their colleagues to sign up.  If that happens, tickets could start disappearing at a good clip.

Scott