Alon is a Senior Software Engineer at Medtronic specializing in 3D and computer graphics with a passion for high performance. He has developed many custom simulation and rendering engines for different platforms using modern C++. He also writes a C++ technical blog and participates in game jams.
Memory safety has become a central concern in modern programming. While Rust’s borrow checker enforces strong safety guarantees at compile time, C++ developers need not remain on the sidelines. This talk explores how the core principles behind borrow checking can be adapted to C++ and enforced entirely at compile time. We begin by examining what the borrow checker actually does, reviewing Rust’s MIR-based analyses such as Non-Lexical Lifetimes (NLL) and Polonius, along with their limitations. We then show how stateful template metaprogramming can be used to build an intermediate representation of program behavior and enforce borrowing rules during compilation. Finally, […]
Modern C++ has many language features and that can be leveraged to design an expressive API or a domain-specific language. However, these features are limited by the syntax rules of C++. To overcome this limitation, we will discuss the use of compile-time parsers to write more expressive code with zero overhead. We will analyze open-source compile-time parsing libraries from C++11 to C++23 and compare their APIs in terms of flexibility and expressiveness. Additionally, we will delve into the techniques used in the implementation of these libraries to handle compile-time parsing under the constraints of compile-time execution. Finally, we will highlight […]