Pure Virtual C++ is a free, one day, virtual conference for the whole C++ community. Join us for five talks on a range of C++ topics.

Sessions

• Automated Testing of Shader Code with Keith Stockdale- Rare has a rich culture of writing automated tests for their game and engine code. The 'Sea of Thieves' project has hundreds of thousands of automated tests that exist to validate behavior and to ensure that bugs are kept to a minimum, as they continually deliver an ever-changing experience to players. Among this large test suite, are tests that validate and verify shader code. This session explores their new Rare Shader Test framework, describing how tests are written for shader code. They will also be delving into the C++ and HLSL implementation of their shader testing framework to discuss the design goals of the system, and how they are using C++ to meet these design goals.

• Message Handling with Boolean Implication with Ben Deane - Message reception and dispatch is something common to many codebases. This talk shows the unreasonable effectiveness of going back to basics and really understanding and unlocking the power of Boolean algebra in the design of a message handling library. We'll talk about composing predicates on messages and manipulating them at compile time in order to do the least work when dispatching them at runtime. Particularly we'll introduce implication, develop an intuition for this lesser-used Boolean operation, and see how it is key to a generic approach for simplifying predicates.

• I Embedded a Programming Language In Debug Information with Sy Brand - DWARF information on Linux provides debuggers with a bridge between high-level source code and the machine instructions generated by the compiler. As part of this, it describes how to locate variables within your program at runtime using a language called DWARF Expressions. When implementing a parser for DWARF Expressions I thought "this seems suspiciously Turing-complete, can I implement a programming language inside this?" It turns out the answer is yes. In this session you'll learn how debug information and executables are stored on Linux systems and how I managed to (ab)use them to implement a programming language interpreter that runs when you ask your debugger for the address of a variable.

• Enhancing C++ development with Copilot Chat with Sinem Akinci - Copilot and Copilot Chat are AI-powered tools integrated into Visual Studio and VS Code that have the potential to unlock new levels of productivity with your C++ development. In this session, we’ll introduce Copilot and Copilot Chat, share tips for achieving the results you want, and provide use cases for using these tools. Then, we’ll see these tools in action in C++ code in Visual Studio as we tackle a variety of problems from navigating and understanding code to refactoring existing code.

• Progress Report: Adopting Header Units in Microsoft Word with Zachary Henkel - Microsoft Office is a huge C++ codebase with nearly 100 million lines of native code. This size provides a constant challenge to build the product as quickly as possible. C++20 header units are a way to receive many of the benefits of modules, while still working with a codebase originally designed for classic header inclusion. At CppCon 2022 we announced that Office would investigate header units with the goal of improved build throughput. We’re excited to present the results of that work for the benefit of the C++ community at large. In this session, we’ll share build performance metrics for the first time.