CppNorth, The Canadian C++ Conference 2025

Two years ago a junior developer, doing her very first "introductory" task, asked the seemingly simple question "should I check for null here?".

This, of course, resulted in a multi page response from me, starting with:

"It depends"

and ending with:

"And that's the short version. For the long version, see my hour/day presentation on whether to check for null (which is actually not about null at all, but Contracts...)"

Aha! Two years later...

This is a talk about Error Handling - but in particular those errors you didn't expect - bugs.

And yes, this is really a talk about Contracts, in particular C++26 (and beyond) Contracts. What are they, What AREN'T they, how to use them and WHY.