Illinois Hosts International C++ Standards Conference

7/21/2016 By Tom Moone

In early November CS @ ILLINOIS played host to the C++ Standards Committee Meeting.

Written by By Tom Moone

On November 6-9, the Siebel Center for Computer Science played host to the C++ Standards Committee Meeting. More than 100 experts in the C++ computer language traveled to Urbana-Champaign to present papers, discuss, and vote on what to include in the next standards document for the C++ language.

The C++ Standards Committee Meeting in November brought over 100 international experts in C++ to the Siebel Center to discuss the next standard for the C++ computer language.
The C++ Standards Committee Meeting in November brought over 100 international experts in C++ to the Siebel Center to discuss the next standard for the C++ computer language.

“We’re an ISO [International Organization for Standardization] standards committee,” said Herb Sutter, chair of the standards committee and a software architect at Microsoft. “We work on the international standard for the C++ programming languages  and this is the first meeting since we published the previous standard, C++14, which makes this the first meeting for the C++17 standard.”

Originally developed by Bjarne Stroustrup at Bell Labs, C++ has developed to become an important and prevalent systems computing language that can be used across platforms. In fact, interest in C++ has been increasing as the ways that people interact with computing systems has been increasing.

“It used to be that if you wanted to reach mainstream consumers, you could write a Windows application and reach 95% of consumers,” explained Sutter. “Now, if you want to address just notebooks and phones and reach 95% of all users, you must ship at least three or four, with a Windows app, a Mac OSX app, an iOS app, and an Android app. There is no single dominant platform.”

Because C++ can be used in all of these platforms, developers do not need to create four different versions of an application. The bulk of the application can be written in C++, with the addition of a platform-specific user or network interface added to that central code.

It’s this utility of C++ that makes standards so important. Developers need to know that a single piece of code will work the same regardless of the system that is running it. “A standard gives you a core, knowing that if you program in this set of language features, it’s going to work everywhere,” Sutter said.

A full committee conference like the one held at Siebel Center takes place two to three times per year, with several smaller meetings on specific topics (such as parallelism) in between full meetings. And teleconferences are regularly performed by various subcommittees within the standards committee.

The C++ standards committee has been meeting since 1990. The meetings are open to the public, and CS @ ILLINOIS students were regular visitors to the meetings throughout the week, but voting members who have a say in what is adopted for standards are invited to full membership and must be accredited by their national body (such as ANSI [http://www.ansi.org/] or INCITS [http://www.incits.org/] for the United States). Membership has of course changed over the years, but there are a few who have been coming to the meetings since the beginning, including Bjarne Stroustrup, the creator and original developer of the language.

Illinois was selected as the location for this conference in recognition of its "long and proud legacy of being heavily involved and a leading school in CS," Sutter said. In addition to that, the university and CS @ ILLINOIS had two other advantages. First, the location was capable of providing a week’s worth of meeting space for the 100 or so attendees in plenary and breakout sessions from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. Second, the department, together with the local office of Riverbed Technology, offered to host the conference. “We are entirely dependent on being invited,” explained Sutter. “So we are very grateful to the department for accommodating us.”

Bjarne Stroustrup, who first developed C++ at Bell Labs, gave a talk on C++ to an overflow crowd of students on the Monday of the standards conference.
Bjarne Stroustrup, who first developed C++ at Bell Labs, gave a talk on C++ to an overflow crowd of students on the Monday of the standards conference.

On Monday evening of the conference, Stroustrup gave a talk as part of the CS Department’s Distinguished Lecture Series titled “C++ as a Modern Language.” In the talk he explained how to program in that language using type safety, resource safety, unmatched performance, and a terse notation. Enthusiasm for this lecture was literally overwhelming as the audience filled auditorium in the Siebel center to standing room only, and two overflow rooms were opened up to watch the talk with a live stream.


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This story was published July 21, 2016.