CppNorth, The Canadian C++ Conference 2025

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Master the art of confident communication to showcase your value and unlock new career opportunities. This session offers practical tools to help you overcome self-doubt, articulate your achievements, and build influence through authentic, clear communication. Gain the confidence to navigate workplace dynamics and take charge of your professional growth.

After 2 full decades of multiple efforts aimed at introducing a contracts feature into the C++ language, contracts have finally been voted into C++26 at the February 2026 C++ Standards Committee (WG21) meeting in Hagenberg, Austria. To be more precise – confirmation into the standard was given to the Contracts MVP – Minimal Viable Product.
This talk will bring you the highlights of the MVP and occasionally also some forecasted features beyond it – some of which might still also make it into C++26, which should be known in time for CppNorth, with this talk duly reflecting any relevant updates. We will shift our focus away from the theoretical background behind contracts and more into some select minutiae and pitfalls encountered along the tortuous process of developing this MVP, while also inspecting the most important things future contracts users should be aware of. And you can also expect some am(a/u)sement along the way!
This talk is being designed based on the current state of the Contracts MVP, and will be brought up to speed with the outcome of the Sofia meeting in June.

A good technical talk is as much about storytelling as it is about presenting information. At best, it is a shared experience between speaker and audience. Even the most complex topics can be presented simply and clearly, sparking questions, conversation, and perhaps even some argument. When this is done well, a good talk becomes a great one and leaves everyone, including the speakers, with more: more understanding, more curiosity, more interest.
Small tweaks to your presentations can make a huge difference. Learn how to add context and clarity to your talks; how much detail is enough; how to craft simple and effective slides; how to be truly comfortable on stage and engage your audience; and how to cope with the unexpected.

I envision much of this as a conversation with the audience where they can discuss their own ideas or works in progress if they choose; share experiences, find presentation ideas from the work they are doing day to day.

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.

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Get ready for a crazy fun & informative talk! Boost your C++ code's performance by utilizing the full power of your computer’s built-in cache. In this talk, we'll delve into the basics of caches, spatial and temporal cache locality, and practical techniques for optimizing cache access. We'll also explore cache prefetching, branch prediction, and false sharing, providing examples modelled on real-world production code and performance benchmarks to drive home each point. By the end of this talk, you'll be equipped with the knowledge and tools to better optimize your code for cross-platform performance gains.

In today’s fast-paced tech landscape, innovation thrives where diversity and creativity intersect. This talk explores the unique synergy between code and culture, revealing how diverse perspectives amplify problem-solving, foster creativity, and drive groundbreaking advancements. We'll dive into real-world examples and research that demonstrate how inclusive teams leverage varied experiences, viewpoints, and skills to craft solutions that resonate globally. Attendees will gain insights into how cultivating a culture of diversity not only enhances team dynamics but also fuels sustainable & impactful innovation. Join me to uncover how diversity in tech isn’t just a value—it’s a vital component of building the future.

Recognizing objects in real-world situations, especially on mobile devices with limited resources or in areas with poor internet connectivity, can be a significant challenge. This talk presents a C++ application for real-time landmine detection, focusing on the Android deployment and its ability to perform on-device detection.

The application, built with the Qt framework written in C++, is designed for both offline (on-device) and online (cloud-connected) operation, balancing performance, accuracy, and connectivity constraints. The Android deployment utilizes the Qt JNI (Java Native Interface) to interact with an ONNX Runtime-based inference engine running in a Java environment, as well as accessing native Android APIs for tasks requiring on-device processing, such as file I/O, thumbnail generation, and network connectivity checks. We will discuss the challenges and solutions involved, including data marshalling between C++ and Java (image format conversion and bounding box result processing), and accessing native Android functionalities from C++. The presentation will include simplified code examples that illustrate these critical integration points.

By the end of the talk, attendees will gain a practical understanding of how to communicate between C++ and Java using JNI, integrate pre-trained deep learning models into their C++ applications, evaluate the trade-offs between on-device and cloud-based processing, and address performance considerations for real-time object detection on Android.

Many individual contributors professionals are choosing to create their careers off-road. Instead of climbing the standard career ladder to and through management, they are choosing to navigate tech careers one project and one team at a time. Such professionals often show their leadership without titles, relying instead on creativity, curiosity, and empathy toward their colleagues.

This panel featuring a group of four engineers who have mapped out their careers as individual contributors is designed as a conversation with our audience, a way to encourage others to understand what is possible. Each panelist has learned to stretch beyond assignments while sharing the day-to-day load on their teams. The panel will also include a manager who leads by trusting his people and providing structure when it is requested. One of the panelists spent some hours interviewing other managers, so they can speak with authority about how they balance a team with strongly self-led individuals.

We believe this discussion can help both managers and individual contributors find balance between team needs and individual growth; to navigate the cultures within their organizations; and understand the value that is derived from professional freedom with intent.

While we all work together now, each of us has worked at other companies and in other circumstances where we thrived mainly because we were able to balance autonomy with a deep sense of collaboration and adventure.

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In this talk, we will explore the power of C++20 ranges and how custom views can simplify complex data transformations and improve code expressiveness. By creating reusable, lazy-evaluated views that operate on ranges, developers can avoid unnecessary intermediate containers and simplify complex data transformations. While standard views like std::views::transform and std::views::filter offer powerful tools for basic operations, custom views provide additional flexibility, allowing developers to create highly specialized transformations and handle more complex, state-dependent logic.  Through real-world examples, we will demonstrate how custom views enhance performance and maintainability, showcasing how they can streamline everything from basic filtering to complex, state-dependent transformations in modern C++ applications.

C++ has stricter rules for running code in constexpr mode. This talk intends to explore those restrictions while offering paradigms for designing data structures that are constexpr compatible, and which will be demonstrated as having potent applications.

Writing an emulator is truly transformative for any aspiring developer. In this session, we will be building parts of a lightning-fast Nintendo GameBoy (DMG-001) emulator library.
We will introduce the concept of a 'fast' emulator, highlighting its significance beyond mere gaming authenticity. After setting clear limits as to what we aim to achieve within the allotted time, we will delve into some foundational aspects of modern computing by implementing the core components of a GameBoy emulator.

Additionally, we will demonstrate how integrating modern high-level C++ constructs streamlines our codebase, enhancing both readability and performance. You will witness firsthand how these constructs simplify development and yield significant speed enhancements (even when applied to emulating low-level systems).

This session aims not only to provide practical insights into modern emulator construction but also to invite collaboration on future enhancements and optimizations.

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