CppCon 2026

AI agents are accelerating code generation at an unprecedented pace, yet C++ file is still compiled as a monolithic translation unit, meaning a many-core machine often cannot rebuild a template-heavy file much faster than a single core. Header-heavy designs, inline functions, and templates compound the problem: the same bodies are parsed repeatedly, and small edits can invalidate an entire translation unit.

This talk presents a compiler-agnostic technique for splitting translation units into smaller independently compilable units. Using libclang, the tool rewrites headers and sources into declaration-only interfaces plus generated .cpp fragments, backed by a shared preamble that can turn into a C++ module, precompiled header, cached serialized AST and a source-map. The fragments compile in parallel, then link into a binary functionally equivalent to the original monolithic build.

Expect benchmarks from major codebases covering compile-time, link-time, and run-time performance; live demos of fast incremental updates that avoid reprocessing unchanged code as well as an analysis of the resulting binaries layout.

Tooling Track sessions are sponsored by Optiver.

What makes an async workflow readable? Not just linear control flow — you also need to see where errors go, what each step depends on, and how failures compose. This talk takes a single production workflow — multiple async RPC calls with conditional branching, parallel fan-out, and partial-failure handling — and shows it implemented in three paradigms: callbacks with thread pools, a workflow orchestration graph over futures, and coroutines with std::expected. We evaluate each through four questions: where does the control flow live, the error flow, the coupling, and the migration risk?

Coroutines restore linear control flow, but without structured error composition, the workflow drowns in manual failure checks at every step, that is more error-handling code than business logic. Task

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.