C++ Meetup in Amsterdam, Netherlands

At the end of November, we visited The Dutch C++ Group at the Meetup in Amsterdam. The Dutch C++ Group is an active group with several Meetups per year and a large community. The theme of this Meetup was “C++: Building Better" and took place in JetBrains’ new office and event space. A big thanks to JetBrains for hosting the event!

The evening started with some delicious pizza, which we were happy to be sponsoring. After the food and drinks our Software engineer Jonathan Müller presented his talk “The New Library On The Block: A strong library foundation for your next project”. This is what he had to say about the event:

“At the C++ Meetup in Amsterdam, I talked about the think-cell-library, which contains our standard library full of small utilities, workarounds for broken C++ features, and a better range library. Afterwards, we had a lively discussion about our replacement for output iterators, the safety benefits of using our index ranges instead of iterators, and how and why we use strong typedefs and user-defined literals to differentiate between ASCII and UTF-8 strings. It was my first local meetup after the pandemic, and I enjoyed the opportunity to connect with local C++ developers over beer and pizza.”

Dmitry Kozhevnikov, team lead in the CLion IDE team at JetBrains also presented his talk “Why Are C++ Builds Slow And What Can You Do About It?”. He covered what a C++ compiler has to do, and how to profile it, went through a list of techniques and tools to speed up C++ builds, looked at some outstanding real-world examples of build performance reductions and speculated whether C++20 modules will save us from all of this. If you are interested in learning more about these topics, head over to YouTube to watch the recordings of the talks.

Our HR representatives Julia and Anna were also present to talk about our C++ developer vacancies and the benefits of working at think-cell.

It was great to meet The Dutch C++ Group in person and we hope to back again soon!