In this talk, we want to take a look at our longest-running project and explain through the lens of its umpteenth rewrite, what we learned from each new version of our language, how we managed to keep up with the hardware evolution, and how our API is affected by those changes.
C++03 is 17 years old. Next year, it’ll be old enough to vote in most countries. Around 2003, Joel started working on his undergrad project — EVE — whose goal was to simplify the design of SIMD-aware HPC code. This was at the very beginning of Boost, the very beginning of understanding that C++ was more than it looked and a time when compilers were … existing…sort of?
Nowadays, while we are being ushered into the age of C++20, it will be interesting to watch what kind of impact five consecutive standards and a decade and a half of compilers technology have had on such a project.