CppCon 2026

An overview of contemporary hardware platforms and how software engineering and design practices and methodologies could help in building performant systems, with a particular focus on low level optimizations. Contrary to attempting direct low level software engineering for addressing performance specifics, this talk would focus on how higher level abstractions could and should be used, and how a software engineer could help the compiler to “do the right thing”. The trend of moving software engineering focus upward to constructs that have a tendency of hiding the specific of the underlying platform is quite clear – and there certainly are very good reasons for such a paradigm change.

Performance matters. Premature optimization is evil. Is there anything in between those two extremes? How feasible is it to rely on the abstraction of the platform as hidden by the compiler and the corresponding libraries and language constructs, expecting that it will be able to realize the intended lower level optimizations? How much of hints and specifics would one need to expose for the compiler to be able to get the equivalent of direct low level approach? What is the right balance between expressing application logic via higher level construct yet still being able to gain the performance benefits compared relying on the low level specifics?

Looking from the practical applicability of lambdas, iterators, ranges, coroutines, error handling, and safe(r) memory access, the talk would attempt to cover a set of use cases with a focus on analysis of what could be done for focusing on performance.

The overall goal of the talk is not to go deep into low level aspects; the goal is to explain that one needs to be aware of such low level details while operating on the higher level constructs.