BoostCon 2011 Report

I've just got back from the BoostCon 2011 meeting at Aspen, CO. It was my first time at this conference and I was very impressed by the high quality of presentations and discussions at the conference.

Overall, one of the big themes running through the conference was (almost) adoption of the new C++ standard which provides many important new language features and adopts some of the Boost libraries into the standard. Michael Wong gave a summary of the new features and the adoption process in his talk on Monday.

Probably the most interesting talks for me were on the use of expression templates and high-performance numerical computing. In particular there were talks by Joel Falcou on a Boost library for writing SIMD code. The code is currently part of NT2 and can be obtained from the NT2 GitHub page. There was also an interesting talk on writing C++ code for the Cell BE processor. Another interesting talk to mention was on the parallels between the C++ template meta-language and Haskell (see blog posts on Bartosz's blog ).

The other important themes at the conference were concurrency in various forms (i.e., c++ memory models, lock-free programming, theads/MPI and much more) and network programming, in particular using the successful Boost.Asio library. The full schedule for the conference is available here and the talks are all available here on GitHub.

Last but not least, I gave a talk on lazy code generation for C++. You can get the PDF or for more information visit http://www.bnikolic.co.uk/lazy/ .