Safer Structs with C++20

Last week (September 2023) on Wednesday the 27th we held another C++ meetup, this time returning to the venYou Ascot House office. Cleapool.io provided the beer, pizza and nibbles!

Once again we managed to have more people turn up than RSVP'ed, with just over 20 in attendance - always a good sign for a meetup! As usual we had a good cross-section of companies represented and some great conversation, both during the main talk, before and afterwards. We even had one person come from as far afield as Shannon (was great to see you again John)!

As ever it was great to see old and new faces and we're looking forward to more regular meetups with one already in the works for late October or early November. Watch this space!

Meetup Summary

The meetup itself followed the usual format of food, drink and snacks accompanied by good conversation and meeting new faces.

Then without too much ceremony we jumped into the talk itself: "Safer Structs with C++20", which I had the pleasure of giving to a very engaged group. There was some great commentary from both Paul, Germans and John. This was largely centred around some of the ancilliary techniques illustrated in the slides such as using enum classes as type-safe (constrained and named) integer types and the use of std::optional as a return type for factory functions.

As promised here are the slides from the talk which I hope people find interesting. As I said on the night this talk really scratches the surface for some more interesting techniques that we can build on top of this. Hopefully we'll get to explore those in a follow up talk in the not too distant future!