Moving Complexity Down: The Real Path to Scaling Up C++ Code - Malin Stanescu - CppCon 2025

Video Description

https://cppcon.org --- Moving Complexity Down: The Real Path to Scaling Up C++ Code - Malin Stanescu - CppCon 2025 --- The top 3 job titles of the CppCon attendees, held by 3/4 of the participants, are or end in the words "Software Engineer"[1]. This phrasing was chosen as a departure from "programmers" and "coders", which would merely write code. To achieve the target outcome, the software engineer is supposed to be a professional at designing and tinkering with the code, not just writing it. The obvious target is to achieve the desired functionality, however far less is agreed on in terms of guidelines for doing so. Naturally, the only remaining options is to have the engineering, the tinkering, focused on adding functionality to software. In this talk I argue that when scaling up the software, engineering for functionality is insufficient. There are 8 orders of magnitude in lines of code from hello world to the world's largest software repositories, a factor obtained with huge effort and often with similar density of functionality, despite the multiplicative gains promised by software development practices. To achieve multiplicative gains, we must move complexity downwards, towards the actual code and inside the programming language. By diving at the level of code itself, we see ways the KISS principle fails and how design patterns work outside of the box. Finally, we look at the foundation of the software, the programming languages and their features, showing how C++ has helped scaling up software development, as well as some concerns on how the new language features fail to help, by comparing lessons learned from other programming languages. [1] https://cppcon.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Job-Title-2048x1942.png from https://cppcon.org/sponsorship/ --- Slides: https://github.com/CppCon/CppCon2025/blob/main/Presentations/Engineering_the_Software.pdf Work at Hudson River Trading (HRT): https://tinyurl.com/safxfctf --- Malin Stanescu Malin Stanescu graduated the Mathematical Tripos at the University of Cambridge and holds a MSc in Theoretical Physics from King's College London. Since graduating, Malin has worked for Continental Autonomous Mobility, where he is now a Senior Software Engineer. In the past 10 years, in parallel to all of the above, Malin has developed software for detecting asteroids through signal processing of telescope images, including 2 years (2022-2024) employed as a part-time researcher (as a second job) through a research grant. --- CppCon is the annual, week-long face-to-face gathering for the entire C++ community. The conference is organized by the C++ community for the community. You will enjoy inspirational talks and a friendly atmosphere designed to help attendees learn from each other, meet interesting people, and generally have a stimulating experience. Taking place this year in Aurora, Colorado, near the Denver airport, and including multiple diverse tracks, the conference will appeal to anyone from C++ novices to experts. Annual CppCon Conference - https://www.cppcon.org https://www.linkedin.com/company/cppcon https://x.com/cppcon https://www.facebook.com/CppConference https://www.reddit.com/r/cppcon/ https://mastodon.social/@CppCon --- Videos Filmed & Edited by Bash Films: http://www.BashFilms.com YouTube Channel Managed by Digital Medium Ltd: https://events.digital-medium.co.uk --- #cpp #cplusplus #cppcon #cppprogramming #cplusplusprogramming #softwaredevelopment #softwareengineering #coding #code #computerscience #technology #technews #programming #programmer