CppCon 2026

Range views enable a “no raw loops” style of programming — not as a matter of taste, but as a pragmatic way to reuse well-tested algorithms to write code faster, express intent clearly, and avoid common bugs. In practice, however, developers often run into issues that may lead them to abandon ranges altogether:

• unintuitive behavior and surprising limitations
• slower compilation and runtime performance compared to raw loops
• high complexity when implementing custom views

In this talk, we’ll distill the core design choices behind these problems — and the alternatives that avoid them. In particular, we’ll compare:

• iterators and indices
• external and internal iteration
• transformations of nested views that overcome limitations of internal iteration

Attendees will leave with practical insights for designing and using range abstractions, along with examples of libraries that embody these ideas.

Starting from the simple objective of writing an optimized lexer we will grapple with their fundamental performance factor: branch prediction. We will investigate how lookup tables can improve (or hurt) the CPUs prediction capabilities with some unexpected results. Over time our design evolves by combining parsing and lexing into a single step in a way that is as fast as just a standalone lexer. A central aspect of the design will be a primitive parsing state machine from which the parser source code is generated.

After the talk attendees will have a better understanding of some advanced branch prediction techniques and should have some new ideas for their present or future parsing endeavors.