Well, Frograrians

Our second (technical) meetup about the Conan Software Package Manager was well received – again. Thanks to the approximately 20 people who attended. Unfortunately, we couldn’t accommodate more participants due to the limited space at our current venue, but we’re working on addressing that. So stay tuned.

C++ News

This time it was up to me, René, to gather some C++ news. Here are my personal favorites:

1. Trip Report from Summer ISO C++ Standards Meeting
   • Herb Sutter, chair of the ISO C++ Standards Committee, shared insights from the ISO C++ meeting in St. Louis, Missouri, USA.
   • Main Highlights:
     • P2300: std::execution was officially adopted for C++26, enhancing asynchronous programming capabilities.
     • P2996: Reflection passed the Evolution Working Group (EWG) and is now being reviewed by the Core Working Group (CWG).
     • P2900: Contracts also made significant progress, with an expected inclusion in the C++26 standard.
     • SG23: The Safety and Security Study Group discussed the borrow checker in the Circle compiler and plans to focus on security enhancements in C++.
   More details and some compiler explorer examples are available in Herb Sutter’s blog: Trip report: Summer ISO C++ Meeting.
2. Upcoming CppCon 2024
   • A presentation titled Bridging the Gap: Writing Portable Programs for CPU and GPU using CUDA by Thomas from the Vienna C++ User Group was accepted for CppCon 2024 in September. This talk focuses on patterns for writing portable code that works on both CPUs and NVIDIA GPUs.
   • Thomas will present a preview of this talk on September 10th during the group’s next meeting.
3. The Beman Project and Boost Libraries
   • Boost Libraries continue to be a vital resource for the C++ community. The Beman Project focuses on aggregating libraries proposed for ISO standardization and simplifying their usage. This initiative helps developers experiment with new C++ libraries before they become official standards.
   More on this can be found in the podcast episode: Boost and The Beman Project.

The news section was enhanced by Sergei and Max, who talked about personal highlights from their visit of CppOnSea (videos just went online 👏).

Main Track

Big thanks to Elvis for sharing how he uses Conan 2 at a professional level. He delivered a well-rounded introduction to the world of Conan 2, covering from installation down to integrating beastly libraries like OpenCV – simply as we’re used to it from other ecosystems by referencing one of the hundreds of packages from the official conan center (but browse for your own 📦here). The small yet crucial details on creating custom profiles and templates, and how to share them as repositories, were particularly valuable — not just for newcomers, but for experienced users as well.

On top of that, did you know that Conan can also be used to set up your build tools, like the Android NDK? And there’s even more on the horizon: there’s ongoing work to develop a Common Package Specification, aiming to unify major package managers (check out “A Common Package Specification: Getting Build Tools to Talk to Each Other” from CppCon 2023). Exciting times ahead!

In the end, who could forget the cool ASCII reverb of our community logo 😎?

And as always, thank you all for an incredibly cool evening — it already felt “like home,” or at the very least, a great reason to come home late.