I’m almost back from the C++ Russia conference held in Moscow these past few days. Heading home later today.

I must say that Sergey created a really nice conference, with a carefully tailored set of talks mostly focussed on parallelism and concurrency.

The conference was opened by Sean Parent, with a keynote somewhere along the lines of “don’t use raw threads” (after his previous hits like “don’t use raw for-loops”). It had everything, great examples from the his projects at Adobe, a few bigger chunks of code, and even abstract scientific parts related to flows in graph theory.

And that was just the beginning.

It was followed by Zoltan Porkolab’s talk on debugging and profiling C++ meta-template programs. Fantastic talk that deserves a separate blog post since it can make a lot of TMP-related headaches go away. I’ll write it one of the following days, when I get my bearings.

It was also a pleasure to listen to Bartosz Milewski talking about category theory and presenting monads in quite an interesting way; Rainer Grimm on how to cope when you need to use the lower-level concurrency primitives; and Guntram Berti on how to properly write your generic code.

Aliens in Moscow: (from the right) Guntram, Zoltan, Bartosz and me
Aliens in Moscow: (from the right) Guntram, Zoltan, Bartosz and me

Unfortunately, a lot of talks were in Russian, so I was not able to follow them. Otherwise, I would not only mention the foreign speakers.

During the intermissions, I talked to local programmers about their environment and popularity of C++ and Qt in Russia. Obviously, since it was a C++ conference, everybody that was present was using C++. But the thing that surprised me is that Qt is also very much alive in these parts of the world. And these were not small IT companies, far from it (not going to mention the names, I have no idea whether this information is public or not :) ).

For the end, a proof that Linux/KDE/C++ people are vandals:

Vandals
Vandals