CppCon 2026

Alan de Freitas is a Staff Engineer at The C++ Alliance and one of its earliest members. He designed the architecture of MrDocs, the Alliance's open-source documentation generator for modern C++, built directly on the Clang and LLVM compiler front end and now being adopted across the Boost libraries. He sets its technical direction, keeping its brilliant and independent contributors converging on it and up to speed on the Clang internals. He created and maintains cpp-actions, the CI automation used by Boost libraries and the Alliance's projects; authored Matplot++, one of the most widely used C++ plotting libraries; and co-authored Boost.URL, taking it through Boost's peer review and maintaining it in every Boost release since 1.81, one of twenty Boost libraries he has contributed to.

Before the Alliance, he spent a decade in academia and industry: a Marie Curie fellowship, aircraft-engine design at the Rolls-Royce Technology Centre in the UK, a visiting professorship at McGill and the Université de Montréal, and ten years as a professor at the Federal University of Ouro Preto teaching advanced C++ and research methods up to the doctoral level. His PhD in computational intelligence led to methods that have been applied to music composition, aircraft-engine and electric-motor design, energy storage for smart cities, and logistics. Rewriting one of those algorithms in C++ turned a coffee break into half a second, moved his research to C++, and led to Matplot++, so that scientific computing could stay in C++, where he is now a US delegate to the ISO committee (WG21). He has more than 50 peer-reviewed publications, two of them in the journals ranked first in the world in computer science and in mathematics, and a best-paper award at GECCO, the world's largest conference on evolutionary computation. He also coordinated a program that taught programming to more than 10,000 students from low-income regions of Brazil.He grew up in the countryside of Minas Gerais, Brazil, and has lived all around the world since.

Off the clock, he cooks, plays guitar, and spends time with his dog. Come say hi and talk to him about documentation tooling and the Clang/LLVM AST, C++ library and API design, or where music meets programming.