Jessica Ding is a software engineer at Bloomberg, where she develops and maintains robust, high-performance trading and order management solutions that enable efficient execution, monitoring, and management of complex orders across global markets. Jessica earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from MIT. In her free time, she enjoys writing logic puzzles, competing in freestyle dance battles, and tinkering with knitting machine compilers.
As legacy C++ codebases evolve to meet new requirements, fix architectural issues, and address performance bottlenecks, refactoring becomes inevitable -- but full rewrites are risky, costly, and rarely practical. This talk explores how modern C++ features — especially functional programming techniques and type erasure — provide low-risk modernization strategies that align with where the C++ language is heading. We'll show how pure functions, discriminated union types, and type-erased callables enable safer, more testable, and more flexible code with compile-time guarantees, even in traditionally object-oriented codebases. You'll see concrete code examples with testing and migration strategies and walk away equipped with […]