Template Meta-State Machines, Madness and Shannon

Last Thursday evening on the 9th of November, we held another C++ meetup, this time at MCS Group's new offices on the 10th floor of The Ewart building who provided not just the location, but food and drinks also. For this meetup we had a special guest speaker in the form of Jason McGuiness, who Cleapool.io organised to come over from London for the event!

We had a great turnout with about 30 people in attendance and many new faces showing just how much growing interest there is in the language in local companies and the increased awareness that a vibrant C++ community exists in Belfast.

Meetup Summary

The meetup started at 6.00pm with the usual socialising over food and drinks. Flight delays meant myself and Jason arrived a little later than intended but still in plenty of time to get started for the talk kicking off close to 7.00pm.

It would not be a meetup without some technical issues but with a great team effort from Naomi, Heather and Jessica from MCS we managed to get Jason's slides up on the big screen and ready for action! So after some short thanks from myself on behalf of Cleapool.io: thanks to MCS for hosting, and thanks to Jason for accepting the invite to speak, we then heard from Naomi on behalf of MCS who reiterated their pleasure in hosting the meetup and supporting the local C++ community.

It goes without saying that a vibrant community needs paid employment opportunities to keep that community alive and engaged. By supporting the community and helping to ensure a liquid job market for C++ opportunities, recruitment agencies can help ensure that market and its growth. Support from MCS to host this meetup was therefore very welcome!

With those formalities over it was time for Jason - the "Mad micro-optimiser" - to take the stage, and take the stage he did!

I think it was fair to say that Jason's talk was delivered with much style and aplomb. Certainly not a "light" topic but I would say fascinating, and presented in a fashion to keep everyone well entertained. You can find his slides below which are sufficiently detailed to allow further reasoning on the off chance you didn't quite fully follow them the first time around!

We had some great interaction with the group, lots of great questions and quite a few talking points along the way. Everything you want from a good meetup, and the originally anticipated one hour talk ended up lasting a good bit longer, but all for the better. So much so that a few of us also ended up heading to the bar to continue the conversation...

Photos from the night

The "After-Meetup"

A key element of the "After-Meetup" was of course some imbibing of the "black stuff" (as well as some softer drinks!) but of note to this writeup here are some of the topics that were covered, such as: What is const? (really, what exactly does it give us?); constexpr vs gperf (the slides should give a clue as to the gist here...); and, lastly, why is std::adjacent_difference kind of different than every other algorithm in C++? (hint: weirdness that results from copying across the first element...)

All food for thought and perhaps some of these might be great topics for the next meetup - let's see!

Finally...

If you enjoyed the meetup and have any commonets please share them below!