CppCon 2026

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.