Reflection: C++’s Decade-Defining Rocket Engine - Herb Sutter - CppCon 2025

Are you enjoying CPPC Con so far? We're at the midpoint of the week . Are you having a good time ? Yeah. Good. And thanks Jimmy and the band . We love having you here every year . This talk is a bit demoheavy, so wish us luck . But first, I want to thank so many people starting with the bigger picture, Dan Katz of Bloomberg , now Adobe, and all sorts of other folks , including many not shown on this slide , who have worked over the past decade , and Dan especially in the last two years to push this over the line so that we actually have reflection in standard draft standard C++ for the first time in history as of just three short months ago . with with anybody who has ever contributed in any way but even in reflector discussion would you please stand up if you have ever participated in in any of that can we give a hand for all these people thank you also you may have gone to Barry's talk on reflection already on Monday in's got another talk there are there are at least four reflection talks this talk is all about what can we do because when we voted reflection into the standard I I the committee allowed me to pause them for a minute just to say this is a big deal and it is going to take us a decade to learn everything we can do with what we just added to the standard . This talk is to give us a survey to fire up our imaginations with a breadth of examples . So if you if one resonates with you, great . Do not try to remember all of them. The slides will be available . The point is the breadth. But let's start off with a few tools