The final technical session of each day at C&B is devoted to your questions and our answers, often with us making comments about the others’ remarks.  It’s our take on the traditional conference panel, where we do our best to make you a part of the discussion.

The first two sessions have general themes, and the themes this year are:

  • C++0x.  The forthcoming standard (which is increasingly being referred to as C++11) brings many new features into C++.  Some are available in current compilers.  Some aren’t. Some are straightforward to use and understand.  Some aren’t.  Some are likely to be useful to essentially everybody.  Others are aimed at developers in fairly narrow niches.  This session is devoted to everything related to the new standard and the features it specifies.  We’ll do our best to answer your questions and offer our opinions on anything in or related to it.
  • Concurrency and Parallelism.  C++ developers typically have opportunities to take advantage of concurrent and parallel computation at a number of levels.  The hardware may offer vectorization units, GPUs, multiple cores, or multiple CPUs (possibly of different types).  The language, as of C++0x, offers multiple threads;  the OS typically offers multiple processes; and multiple machines may be applied to a single problem.  That means that clusters, grids, farms and, yes, clouds are also a part of the concurrency/parallelism mix, as are things like algorithm and data structure design, job partitioning, load balancing, data consistency, and much, much more.  This session throws the door open to all questions and topics related to this very broad area, from C++ itself to the parallelism challenges faced by the kinds of applications its used for. We certainly don’t know all the answers, but this is a critical topic area for C++ developers, and we’ll do our best to shed some light on at least parts of it.

The final Q&A session at C&B is as simple and open-ended as we can make it:

  • Ask us anything!  (If you have questions about this topic, um, ask them at the session.)

If you’d like to pre-load these sessions with questions or topics you’d like to see us address, use the commenting function on this page to do it.  We can’t make any guarantees about whether we’ll be able to talk about all the things that come up here (based on last year’s C&Bs, there will be too many topics for too little time), but putting your question or topic here will guarantee that we’ll be aware of it, and that’s an important first step.

Scott