CppCon 2026

Embedded systems often operate under strict timing and reliability constraints, yet most existing file systems prioritize throughput and flexibility over predictability. This mismatch can lead to non-deterministic behavior, unbounded latency, and difficult-to-debug failures in resource-constrained environments. In resource-constrained environments such as automotive control units and aerospace flight systems.

This talk explores the design and implementation of a deterministic file system built specifically for embedded systems using modern C++. Rather than focusing on feature completeness, the system prioritizes predictable behavior through fixed block allocation, metadata-first layouts, and bounded operation times.

We will examine how determinism can be treated as a first-class design constraint, influencing everything from on-disk structure to API design. The talk will also highlight how modern C++ features—such as strong typing, RAII, and compile-time configuration—can be leveraged to enforce correctness and reduce runtime overhead without sacrificing clarity.

Attendees will gain insight into real-world tradeoffs required to achieve determinism, including limitations in flexibility and storage efficiency, as well as strategies for adapting the design across different hardware backends such as file-backed devices, SPI flash, and embedded Linux block devices.

This session is aimed at engineers building systems where predictability matters more than peak performance, and who want to apply modern C++ techniques to low-level, resource-constrained environments.

How far can modern C++ push an emulator before performance stops being a C++ problem and becomes a systems problem? This talk is the final part of a CppCon trilogy about building an extremely fast Game Boy emulator in modern C++, moving from high-performance emulation techniques to the limits imposed by hardware, compilers, and CPU architecture.

The target is intentionally absurd but not arbitrary: a Game Boy emulator running Tetris at roughly 100 times original speed, about 6,000 frames per second. However, the goal is not to support every Game Boy cartridge ever made. This project deliberately specializes for one iconic game first, using the code paths Tetris actually exercises as a guide, while keeping enough design discipline to test other games later. That means questioning the architecture of the emulator itself: instruction dispatch, memory access, generated code size, cache behavior, branch prediction, compile-time computation, benchmarking methodology, and the tension between accuracy, maintainability, flexibility, and raw throughput.

This is not a victory-lap performance talk. It is a measurement-driven engineering investigation. Rather than treating 6,000 FPS as just a headline number, this talk treats it as a stress test: a way to force difficult design decisions into the open. Attendees will leave with concrete lessons about performance-oriented C++: how to measure methodically, how to specialize without losing control, how to reason about modern CPU behavior, and how to decide when an optimization is worth its cost.

Sean Parent's "no raw pointers" guideline is often misunderstood as "avoid T* , use smart pointers instead", even though Sean explicitly included smart pointers in his definition of a raw pointer: "anything with implied ownership and reference semantics".

This talk presents a refinement of that guideline:

Pointers - smart or not - shall not appear in function signatures, neither as argument nor as return type.

The focus of this talk is how to implement classes as regular types while still supporting dynamic allocation, polymorphism, and sharing internally.

It shows how such value types can be implemented manually, without dedicated library support. It then follows the evolution of the language and library in gradually simplifying these abstractions: C++11 smart pointers ( unique_ptr and shared_ptr ), C++26 vocabulary types ( indirect and polymorphic ), as well as in-progress proposals ( copy_on_write and protocol ) are presented as tools to simplify writing safe abstractions, not as safe abstractions themselves.

Along the way, the talk revisits the Rules of 3/5/0, exception safety guidelines, const propagation, aliasing, and local reasoning.

The talk aims to make you stop passing pointers around.

Modern C++ gives developers powerful tools to write cleaner, safer, and more expressive code — but many production codebases still suffer from excessive boilerplate, repetitive patterns, and verbose implementations inherited from older C++ styles.

This talk explores practical modern C++ techniques that significantly reduce lines of code while preserving readability, maintainability, and runtime performance.

Through real-world examples, we will refactor traditional C++ implementations using features such as ranges, structured bindings, constexpr, concepts, CTAD, lambdas, std::optional, std::variant, and std::expected. We will examine where these features genuinely improve code quality — and where they can accidentally hurt clarity or performance if misused.

The session also goes beyond syntax improvements by analyzing generated assembly, compiler optimizations, allocations, and benchmark results to validate whether “shorter” code truly remains zero-cost.

Attendees will leave with practical patterns they can immediately apply to modernize existing codebases, reduce unnecessary complexity, and write more expressive C++ without sacrificing performance.