CppCon 2018

Smart references (aka "operator dot overloading") and Unified Call Syntax, it would be great if C++ supported both of them out of the box. Despite community requests, dating back from the 90s, the many proposals to add them to the language have been rejected. Therefore, we will have to wait until the arrival of a proposal that does succeed.

Or should we? Not if you use my smartref library, a modern header-only zero-overhead library for creating smart references. Last year at CppCon2017, I was awarded the jury's first prize for my poster about the library, because of its high quality and innovation in the presented approach. Now, one year later, I've gained many new insights, and would like to share them with all of you.

In this talk, I will show you some compelling examples of problems my library can solve in a very elegant way. Secondly, I will walk you through the design of the library, and show how tricky adding support for the most trivial operations turns out to be. Finally, I will show some unexpected possibilities of the library that I didn't initially foresee. For example, the Unified Call Syntax, which allows you to call free functions, using a member function syntax. Come to my talk, and be inspired by the new building blocks we can already create using existing C++.