CppCon 2026

Making native code fast is a team sport: efficient algorithms, high-performance libraries, memory-conscious design, and modern hardware all play a role. But the critical link between your code and the hardware it runs on is the optimizing compiler.

This talk explores new & improved compiler optimizations in Visual Studio 2026, and how these improve the performance of existing C++ code with minimal source changes. We will examine both architecture-independent optimizations (such as improved scalar replacement, vectorization, and loop transformations) and architecture-specific enhancements (such as AVX-512 and NEON specific optimizations). Along the way, we will connect high-level C++ constructs to the generated assembly and CPU behavior to build an intuition for how performance improvements are realized. While the talk discusses Visual Studio code generation & optimizations, the tools and analysis apply to all native platforms & compilers.

We will also introduce sample-based profile-guided optimizations (SPGO) which uses the runtime characteristics of your application to guide optimization decisions, WITHOUT requiring traditional instrumentation. You will learn how SPGO works, how to apply it in practice, and where it delivers measurable gains: typically in the 5-15% range across real world native codebases.

Attendees will leave with a practical understanding of how to reason about native code performance, and how to leverage SPGO to turbocharge the performance of their code.

Last year I introduced the SDL3 library which provides a solution for building games and graphical applications on multiple platforms. In this talk, we will continue our journey into SDL3, which newly includes the ability to write shaders within the built-in 2D API. My goal is to get you up and running fast by building out a small game application. Throughout the talk I will show how to build a small 2D framework, discussing design decisions and which C++ features can be used to help organize our code. Attendees will leave this talk ready to build multimedia / game applications and with an understanding on if SDL3 is the right tool for them.