For the third year in a row, we had a C++ day in Spain. Our local event using::std cpp 2015 starts to consolidate as an annual event for the Spanish C++ community. Each Fall more than 100 developers join some academics and students to exchange experiences about using C++.

DISCLAIMER: Please, note that all talks where given in Spanish. We will be publishing the slides and videos in the next days. However, we feel that this activity is of interest for a wider audience.

This year I opened the event with a short talk giving a subjective view of what could there be (or not) in C++17, as well as providing updates on the status of different C++ technical specifications.

Joaquín M. López, from Telefónica (also a well known contributor to Boost) provided a lot of insights on the effects of processor caches for C++ programmers. The talk provided a high level view of the needed hardware concepts. Then Joaquin focused in providing many C++ examples and how they could be reworked to take advantage of cache behavior to improve performance.

Jesus Megía, software engineering leader at Tecnobit (a spanish space and defense company) showed how they use continuous integration in their projects. The talk provided a very nice view on how they combine open source and commercial products in their software development pipeline. According to several attendees this gave them new ideas in how to combine different tools and also made them aware of tools they did not know.

Pablo San Segundo, an associate professor at Madrid Technical University, gave a talk on graph coding by means of bit strings and their industrial applications. He illustrated all the examples with his own libraries bitscan and graph.

Luis M. Sanchez, a researcher at University Carlos III introduced the audience to the new parallelism technical specification. He presented the currently approved library solution for parallelism and provided with different small examples showing that the average programmer can benefit from parallelism in different use cases.

Jose Manuel Caicoya, a software engineer from INDRA Sowftware Labs specialized in air traffic control systems, provided a talk on move semantics. The talk had the special value of coming from a practitioner and focused on how they are using move semantics in real applications and the benefits they are getting from this.

I could not resist to give a talk myself. I gave my very personal view on contracts programming. I focused on general concepts and approaches. I also provided some hints on how a contracts programming language extension could be and tried to identify where some problems are.

Manu Sánchez, also provided a basic introduction to concepts. Manu is well known as a metaprogrammer. Nevertheless, he made a simplification effort to show the basics of concepts TS.

Finally, we had a final round-table to have an open discussion on C++ present and future. In this talk, we were able to hear opinions from the above mentioned Jose Manuel Caicoya, giving his view from the aerospace application domain. Iván Gálvez from BQ (a Spanish company not only manufacturing smartphones and tablets) gave the viewpoint from a consumer electronics company. Finally Juan Morales from BBVA (a major Spanish bank) gave the viewpoint from a financial institution. Then we opened participation to public.

11 hours and 30 minutes after we had started we had to invite people to leave the room. Although, I would say a bunch still wanted more. 🙂