CppNorth, The Canadian C++ Conference 2025

The C++ programming language does not have a standard graphics library, However, there exists many popular graphics frameworks for cross-platform graphics. In this talk, I will provide an introduction to the Simple Directmedia Layer (SDL) library, which has at the start of 2025 released version 3. This library for several decades has been a standard in the games and graphics industry. Throughout this talk, I will show how to get started with the library, some more advanced examples (including compiling graphics applications to web), and then talk about what a standard graphics library could look like in C++, or if it is even necessary. I will also talk about the 3D GPU library in SDL3. Attendees will leave this talk ready to build multimedia / game applications and with an understanding on if SDL3 is the right tool for them.

Working with C++ code can be difficult, and it's made even more difficult when the code isn't your own. Everyone agrees that documentation is necessary when sharing a library. But, as a user of a library, the documentation may not help when you want to know the current state of your program. If you're a veteran C++ programmer then you may easily find your way around memory readouts, putting print statements in exactly the right spots, or reading "between the lines" of the documentation. Some of us are not very experienced, or we aren't able to recompile the code with print statements, or the documentation may not help with the problem. Hopefully, the author had written an extension to connect their code to your debugger of choice. But odds are, they didn't. Debuggers are advanced tools, often overlooked when discussing the day-to-day aspects of writing C++ code. Without modifying the source code or recompiling, we can glean large amounts of information about the program state through our debugger. As library writers, or as people writing classes for others to use and reuse, we can and should be writing debugger visualizers. We can empower our users by lowering the barrier to using the library successfully.

This talk will outline how to make the most out of debuggers like the Visual Studio debugger and GDB. Briefly touching on the of how to start up the debugger, this talk will cover topics like automating and scripting the debugger, and writing custom visualizations like Visual Studio Natvis and GDB pretty-printers. This talk is here for you to get started with writing debugger visualizers. Let's make our libraries more accessible. Software is about more than just the source code.

Every few years, someone will proudly declare they have an idea or technology that will replace expensive software engineers (or at least make us less expensive). These include everything from early programming languages such as Fortran and Cobol, WYSIWYG editors, diagram-based programming, modern programming languages such as TypeScript, and, most recently, AI coding tools. So far, these innovations have helped developers by abstracting away time consuming and repetitive tasks, which has made us more efficient, more specialized, and has allowed us to build increasingly complex systems. This talk will explore the history of technologies that were supposed to make us obsolete, how they’ve actually helped us, and why we’re so hard to replace.