Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs - Episode 259: 🇳🇴 NDC TechTown 🇳🇴 Vittorio Romeo & JF Bastien

Episode Date: November 7, 2025

In this episode, Conor and Bryce record live from NDC TechTown in Norway! We interview Vittorio Romeo and JF Bastien about C++, training, their talks and more!Link to Episode 259 on WebsiteDiscuss this episode, leave a comment, or ask a question (on GitHub)SocialsADSP: The Podcast: TwitterConor Hoekstra: Twitter | BlueSky | MastodonBryce Adelstein Lelbach: TwitterAbout the Guests:Vittorio is a passionate C++ expert with over a decade of professional and personal experience. His expertise covers library development, high-performance financial backends, game development, open-source contributions, and active participation in ISO C++ standardization. He is the coauthor of "Embracing Modern C++ Safely" and is a speaker at over 25 international conferences.JF Bastien has worked on hardware, compilers, security, performance, web browsers, and airplanes. As chair of the C++ language evolution working group and co-designer of WebAssembly, his contributions have helped shape modern software development.Show NotesDate Recorded: 2025-09-24Date Released: 2025-11-07camomilla by Vittorio Romeoromeo.trainingRoku rostdASDP Episode 136: 🇬🇧 C++ On Sea Live 🇬🇧 CppCast, TLB HIT & Two's Complement!TLB.hitJAXOpenXLA[LATTE '22] Chris Leary: X-istentialism: Supercomputers, Silicon Atoms, and the Science Between!Guest Lecture - XLS (Chris Leary)Project DenverIntel pays NVIDIA $1.5BNDC TechTown JF Talk*(char*)0 = 0; - What Does the C++ Programmer Intend With This Code? - JF Bastien - C++ on Sea 2023Keynote: Safety and Security: The Future of C++ - JF Bastien - CppNow 2023All the Safeties: Safety in C++ - Sean Parent - CppNow 2023NDC TechTown Vittorio Romeo TalkMore Speed & Simplicity: Practical Data-Oriented Design in C++ - Vittorio Romeo - CppCon 2025CppCon 2014: Mike Acton "Data-Oriented Design and C++"Intro Song InfoMiss You by Sarah Jansen https://soundcloud.com/sarahjansenmusicCreative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0Free Download / Stream: http://bit.ly/l-miss-youMusic promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/iYYxnasvfx8

It's my first time on the podcast, I want to say. I was expecting a C++ podcast, but it's so much more than that. When I think of C++ shops, I think of Google, I think of Microsoft, I think of Adobe, I think of Bloomberg. Some companies have been divesting, they've been trying to maybe move to Rust or have their own competitor like Carbon. Yeah, Transmeda. It was a hot startup in the 90s. It was a company that made an X-D6 chip that competed with Intel and EMD and VIA. Mike's keynote was eye-opening for a little people, me included.

That is up there with Sean Parents, C++ Now, keynote from like 2012 or 2013. A normal struct and automatically converting it to an SOA layout using reflection even in sales plus 17. The voice in my head is like, blah-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-ha. Yes, the message, of course, is be angry. That's what we're saying. And also, you said you're Canadian-eyes, or you've been very mean to me today. I will not forget that. Please use a monospace font. Hi, my name's Jeff.

What do you want to know? Welcome to ADSP, the podcast, episode 259, recorded on September 24, 2025. My name is Connor, and today with my co-host, Bryce, we interview live from NDC Techtown 2025 in Kongsburg, Norway, both Victoria Romeo and J.F. Bastion. we talk about their respective talks, C++, training, and more. All right, folks, we're here. It's technically day three for Bryce and I of NDC Techtown, but it is day one for most folks because the conference has started today.

We have finished our Kuta trainings, which you heard last episode a week ago as we chatted about that in the lobby of the hotel. And now we are here at the tail end of day one. had our first day of talks. Bryce is going to be interviewing Vittorio Romeo, folks. You've heard about him on the podcast. We've never interviewed him.

He is the author and behind many projects. The one that I bring up the most, as I've told Vittorio, is Camamilla, the compiler, the compiler, the template error compiler reducer. Actually, that's a terrible explanation. But listen, I've had a couple of Carlsbergs. It's actually true. Wait, we're in Norway now and we're drinking Carlsberg? That's the beer of Denmark.

What's going on here? Anyways, we're here with Vitorio. I'm handing the mic over to Bryce. He's headed out tonight, so we only have Bryce for another two hours minus the, or two and a half hours minus the time for the C++ quiz. Bryce is going to interview Vittorio. Hopefully Vittorio introduces himself for the listener. Here we go. Yeah, Vittorio, I mean, how would you introduce yourself?

I feel like you've done so many varied things. You're a trainer, you've worked in FinTech, and you also work in game, the game design space. I mean, how would you introduce yourself? Last time I checked, you work at Bloomberg. Do you no longer work? No. How long have you not? So wait, the last time I checked.

JF Bastion just showed up. This is the thing. J.F. Bryce said like literally three minutes ago. Oh, J.F. and Chandler left. Chandler from Google and J.F. from some startup that we don't know what it does. I have to read you this text exchange from J.F. I, I text J.F. I asked him where he is.

He says he went to the root, drop my bag in the room, coming back now. And I said, have you seen Chandler? And he said, he's not in my room. We're clearly J.F. understood that that's not what I meant. So, wait, wait, well, all right. We'll get you introducing Victoria in a moment. This is going to take some time, folks. So I know you're young, but have you seen the Pink Panther, the movie?

I have not seen the Pink Panther. We haven't seen the movie. We know who he is, though. With Peter Sellers, right? No, we don't know the actors. We know what the Pink Panther is. That's it. We're born in the 90s, okay?

So there's one of the Pink Panthers, because there's multiple of them. I have him on VHS, if you want to borrow them any day. Peter Sellers is in a hotel, and he goes in, and he sees someone with the dog. I have the microphone. So he sees someone with a dog, and he's like, does your dog bite? And the person answers, no. And so Peter Sellers, the Inspector Cluzzo, comes in, and he goes to pet the dog. and then he gets bit by the dog

and he goes to the person and says I thought you said your dog didn't bite and then the person replies that's not my dog and so fairly often you and I have exchanges where you ask a question and I answer the question you asked

did you bring your VHS tapes on your international move to Japan I did yes but first last time I checked Vitorio was working at Bloomberg and at one point I mean you can fill in the details but this is what I know you were an engineer at Bloomberg and then you transitioned to an internal kind of trainer at Bloomberg and you were in charge of kind of C++ education I know that there's a guild system I'm not super

familiar because I've never worked there but I remember having a conversation where you had kind of like transition to one of your dream roles of like being in charge of education of Bloomberg but you no longer at Bloomberg and I saw it was Romeo dot training which hopefully is a URL maybe it's not anyways, we're going to hand the mic to Vittorio, and he can, or Bryce is checking if it actually is a domain that you can go to. Introduce yourself and tell us about your work history and what you're up to now, because clearly you've moved on from Bloomberg. Thank you, thank you.

So it's my first time on the podcast, I want to say. I was expecting a C-Pas-Past podcast, but it's so much more than that. So it is very interesting, and thank you for having me. Yeah, you're correct. I used to be a Bloomberg for the past 10 years. And the first half, I kind of did software engineering on low latency, high-reput, high-performance, backends, including our microservice infrastructure, market auto-data analytics, and then I switched gradually organically to training.

I felt like there was a gap in the way that we were teaching engineers C++. There was nothing on motorcycles plus, nothing on, you know, the newer standards. So I kind of started with something small. I realized it was something I was good at and I really liked. So over the course of multiple years, it became my main focus on my main job. and I was in charge of the civil class education, especially the modern part. I stopped working at Bloomberg this September, so very, very, it is very recent. So, yeah, right now I'm trying to start this venture where I'm going to do independent consulting, contracting, and training.

So far as new territory for me, so I have a few clients here and there, mostly individuals that are mentoring. And it's really rewarding to be able to focus on one person at a time and, you know, seeing them transform their sea-like. code into something a bit more, you know, modern and safe. So it's really rewarding to see that, but it's very new territory for me. So I'm exploring around seeing how it goes. But to answer your question, like, yes, I've been doing a lot of very different things. I feel like the thing that ties them all together is my undying, passionate love for C++ and good software engineering. So doubled in very different domains, game development, finance, training, but it's all of always been C++ and nice code. That is probably the time.

All right, so I've got two questions, and then I'll let Bryce ask the questions from here, but I am very curious. So, if we had to rank corporations by their C++ usage and also kind of, when I say usage, I also mean like attendance at committee meetings, Bloomberg definitely makes the top 10 and maybe makes the top five. I don't really know, but the point being is Bloomberg is one of the kind of major companies. I also think about it number three Bryce says number three We're not talking about Java strip right now Wait, do you actually have like the top five or ten? Yeah, I know because it's easy to find

You just go to the U.S. national body and you look at the top byors The C++'s committee, yeah Okay, you're not talking about like millions of lines of code Anyways, the point being, Bloomberg is up there as like When I think of C++ shops, I think of Google, I think of Microsoft, I think of Adobe, I think of Bloomberg, anyways, the point my first question is how long were you in charge of education at Bloomberg and my second question is what is it like training one of these kind of frontier companies in terms of you know you've been using

c++ not just for years but for decades what is it like training and like getting people i don't know if you're going from 98 to 11 or 11 to 20 uh what does that like because i imagine you have very interesting i don't want to say war stories but just stories to tell about that kind of education process yeah so i feel like training at bloomberg was really interesting because you get an extremely diverse set of people, skill sets, seniority. And you might have the super skilled engineer that knows everything about finance but hasn't moved from C in 10 years. Or you might have the person that has been doing a lot of functional programming

but never done that in C++. So you get a very difficult, varied audience. So it does make it interesting because everybody has a different background. So the interactivity and the fun of the training is certainly higher as you get to get people to get a know better and they will kind of share their background and contribute in some way by, you know, having the training scene from their perspective,

which is something that is interesting, but definitely challenging. I've taught from MotorC++ Plus 11, 14, 17, and 20, so I've done pretty much all the spectrum, and we offered them in, you know, several courses so that people have this learning path, they could gradually learn newer and newer standards. For the first part of the question,

I feel like Bloomberg is heavily invested, in the future of C++, while some other companies are backing down a little bit. You mentioned Google, for example. Google has been... Yes, exactly. Some companies have been divesting. They have been trying to maybe move to rust or have their own competitor like carbon. Bloomberg still heavily believes in C++'s future.

They are actively working in the standard to try and solve or mitigate. I don't know what the right word is. The safety issues and whatever makes C++ plus a bit less attractive nowadays compared to other languages. and they do have a huge code base which they don't intend to migrate to something else. They intend to keep maintaining and keep upgrading as a standard growth. So I feel like a very big player in this area

and it explains why they put a lot of resources into the standard committee and keeping their code base in C++ plus. Well, I mean, we were just mentioning, I mean, it might have been a week ago now, but whenever we had the Roku meetup, they were presenting, we can't talk about the specific

specifics of their presentation, but they showed some roasted code, which was row for Roku and STD for the standard namespace. And I went through off the top of my memory of all the different kind of insert, letter, SL standard libraries. And Bloomberg is one of the most well-known kind of open-sourcing, a lot of their tooling and their standard libraries. And there's a lot of talks, whether it's at, you know, just a plethora of C++ conference showing different aspects of that. So yeah, Bloomberg is very well-known for kind of open-sourcing, their internal corporate standard library and yes anyways very interesting to hear about the transitioning what is the last question then I'm gonna I'm at because I can tell Bryce got some

questions what is the what is the you said up to C plus plus 20 is that the the latest that Bloomberg's at officially yes like we we used to have like a vetted compiler suite with a certain standard and I do believe that we ended up at 6 plus 20 while I was still in the company but there were teams also dabbling with S Plus 23 before other teams. It's a very, let's say teams have a lot of decision power. So if they had a good reason, too, they could move to standards even before the other teams. But 20 was officially the latest one. Good to know.

All right, I'm handing the mic to Bryce. Well, it's actually, it's a very fortuitous timing that we're talking to Vittorio, a trainer, because we just did two workshops. whole year at work at nVIDIA there's been a big push on outreach and education of material and i've been doing a lot more training and talks and developing training material and uh connor this was your first time teaching a course you did the first half of our c plus plus course i guess i'm kind of i got a question for you which is what was it like as a first time trainer what was your experience it was exhausting i love giving talks because they're an hour or 90

minutes max. An eight-hour training day. I don't know if it's the introvert in me, if it's the guy that likes to be in front of multiple monitors with an RGP keyboard, but just like eight hours is, I mean, I didn't even, you know, I wasn't speaking for the full eight hours. I only did half the day. But it was exhausting. And I think also too, it's partly because I did not create the source material entirely myself, I feel like if I had designed a course specifically the way I wanted to teach it and specifically geared towards the things that I wanted to teach, it would have been much different. But taking curated content from, you know, a bunch of folks and then having to teach content that's not, you know, you didn't, you don't know it inside and out in terms

of like, I don't know, like sometimes I was looking at the preview screen, looking at, is the solution on the next slide or is there another slide showing like what to do? And you never have that when you're giving your own talk. Like, or at least the way that I give talks, I've rehearsed it a couple times. It's almost like off the back of whatever. Like, so you, it's almost, I don't know. Rehears sounds bad because it sounds like, you know, not the way, but you practice. And so you know what's coming.

And so at no point are you ever like, am I saying the right thing? Or do I need to spend longer on this point? And it was the point being, I think I could come to love training. But if it was going to be me loving a training course, I would have to basically do all the material from scratch, which... You're volunteering. Yeah, Bryce is like, oh, you just volunteer? No, I'm not volunteering to do that.

I do not necessarily... That's not the direction I want to take my career in. But anyways, I have a much greater appreciation for trainers. I assume you're going to be creating all your content, so hopefully that will help with the training process. But anyways, it's very exhausting. I think 90 minutes, in my opinion, it's the perfect talk length. 30 minutes is insanely too short.

45 minutes is okay. An hour's all right. 90's perfect. And eight hours is just insane. But yeah, it's my first time, so. I think you lose people 100 for 90. JF, do you, have you ever done training? I mean, you, I assume when you were at Woven, that you were, you probably were responsible

for some training, like, figuring out, like, training and education. That was probably part of your... We jumped the gun twice. J.F. has never actually formally been interviewed. The last time you were on... Oh, not an interview. Yeah, yeah, not interviewed. The last time you were on was one of the highlights.

Highlights of the podcast, we reference it often, folks. We're going to see Sean Parent at C++ Under the Sea in T-minus three weeks, two weeks. And JF was there. Part 1, I think, of that three-part cut, where the part 2 and part 3 were just with Sean was, what's the word? A plethora, a smorgasborg. There's no word to describe what happened. J.F. was there popping in and out and in and out. And I think we had Phil Nash, we had you, we had almost representation from every single C-plus

podcast at the time. Anyways, folks may or may not remember you. You've got to introduce yourself, J.F. I mean, you move to Woven, aka Toyota. We talked about the Prius earlier. He said it wasn't his fault. He actually didn't say that.

I'm just being nice. It might have been his fault, folks. But before that, he was at Apple. Now, we don't know where he's at, and he's not telling. He actually does, he does have a... Clarify because it sounds, without context, it sounds like you have some, it sounds like you have some issue fundamentally with the

entire Prius and that the Prius is J.F.'s fault. I mean, we don't know. That might be the case. He hasn't told us. You didn't clarify that it was that you have UI issues with the Prius software, not with the whole idea of the Prius's

a car. I'm an owner of a Prius. Great car. Bad software. It overheats my phone when charging, so we don't charge it. Anyways, on LinkedIn, it says stealth startup. On his badge, it says stealth. Am I allowed to say this? Physical systems. Actually, does it say on LinkedIn?

It might say that on LinkedIn as well. Anyways, it says stealth, physical system startup. So we're getting two more words in... I think that's the extent of what we're going to get here. It's probably the extent. I mean, we can't ask, and he's allowed to say, it says physical system startup on LinkedIn. I am corrected.

And we can always ask, and he is always allowed to say, at this moment in time, I can't say more. And potentially, he'll say, actually, I can tell you exactly what we're doing. Anyways, introduce yourself from Apple to Toyota to who knows. Well, you know where JF used to work back in the dance. Invidia. And I actually didn't know this when we first met. I think I was just falling in love with array languages.

And you told me a little story where you had created, like, I don't know if it was an array DSL at Nvidia. And I just thought that was crazy. And I was like, why didn't that take over? Like array languages, GPUs, they're a perfect fit. And it sounds like you were tapping on like the goldmine and you just didn't tap hard enough because I think you really, you know, anyways. We're handing the mic to JF.

I feel like we just asked you 17 questions, so feel free to answer as many as you would like. Here you go. Hi, my name's JF. What do you want to do? Yeah, I mean, so what's your AI startup on? It's not an AI startup. I know. I was hoping that you would be like answer the question accidentally because odds are it is an AI startup.

But clearly you didn't fall for the bait. No, we use GPUs. Yeah, GPUs are good. They go burr. It's like, yeah, yeah, they do a lot of stuff. Mostly just going bird. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, what do you want to know?

So, do you want to know about dynamic binary translation? Yeah. Well, no, he asked you about, the first question that was asked was about the training. And then we, uh, so I hired Robert Seacord to do a lot of the trainings. And then we. At Woven? Yeah, what was the mindset? Like, as somebody, as somebody was putting together in corporate internal training, what was like, what were you?

trying to try. Well, I'm not a company representative anymore, so I can't officially talk about the company. But yeah, I mean, every big company that has a variety of type of developers does training, so it makes sense to train your developers, especially when you develop safety systems. So, like, one interesting aspect, and this is like part of international standards, like when you do safety software development, is you have to have a safety mindset when you develop stuff. That's part of, like, ISO2662, but it's part of other standards as well. Right? So part of having a safety mindset is actually having training towards safety,

and what it is and how to apply it. I don't really have training, but, yes. I guess we don't have a safety. You're part of the world that does ISO2662 does trainings. Yeah, I'm sure that that part of the comfort is. Yeah. But yeah, do you want to talk about binary translation? What do you want to do?

Yeah? Wait, actually, a question popped into my head. TLB hit. Seven episodes. what's going on buddy yeah so tlb hit is a weekly podcast that my friend chris and i started uh during the pandemic no no it inspired your podcast and and mad godbolt's podcast you should go back you should go back in the internet and look internet is forever my friend nothing vanishes it's weekly in that like they released one podcast in the same week every year

you you guys work on concurrency and parallelism weekly in the same of like weak memory systems. There's going to be eventual, yeah, there's going to be eventual consistency in the podcast. But yeah, so Chris and I have this weekly podcast called TLBHt, TLBH.it, tlbh.it. And it's a wonderful podcast. We have a plethora of episodes.

There's even some unreleased episodes. What's going on? Which haven't. Yeah, we haven't released them. He does have, both him and his co-host have kids. Doesn't your co-host have kids? Not together. I just want to clarify.

Wonderful guy, but we tend not to... Yeah, he has twins and then know the kid. Yeah, yeah. But one of the issues we have is he lives in California and I live in Japan. And so it makes it difficult to... It makes it difficult to have kids in that circumstance. You were not releasing episodes when you both live in California. Well, so you need to acquire before you release when we were talking about weak memory systems.

and uh i remember i forgot how painful it is i know i know so yeah but it's a great podcast uh really good times when we record it i love being on podcast amazing episodes remember oh well it's uh we count from zero but it's on the website you should go and check it out i mean i have checked it out it's it's going to be in the show notes it's going to be in show notes wait i mean we will have at some point we actually do have to align time zones and we'll interview jap but i i discovered i was doing a deep dive into Jax and the Jax's back end XLA now OpenXLA and I look for some talks on it. I find two online, both by the same person, a guy named Chris, and what's his last name? Leary? A guy named Chris Leary. At the time I was like, I don't know who this is. And then at

some point, like a week later, I was like, wait a second, because I think I got to watching the second talk. The first talk was amazing. Both talks were amazing. And I was like, wait, this is JF's co-host. J-F's co-host is basically, I don't know if he was the solo author or the co-author of XLA, which is the live, you know this? The back end to like the premiere. XLS also? Anyway, I was like, we got to have him on the pod too. Will we have J-F or will we have Chris Leary? And I had no idea, because he's at Open AI now, so we know this guy's probably a billionaire. Is he still wondering an X-LIN? Where did you work again? Remind me?

In video? Oh, right. Okay, cool. Right. You guys just gave $100 billion to Open AI, right? Yeah, I think we owned for an open AI. 10% or something. I haven't checked any... I've been here in Europe for a week.

All I heard was Kimmel was canceled. And... It's uncanceled. It's uncanceled? It's unc canceled? Yeah, it's unconsled. Well, that's fantastic. I thought...

Actually, we're going to just veer away from this topic. But we support democracy. here in Canada except we're in Norway but Norway also supports democracy anyways Chris the author or like the founder of XLA I found that very exciting

I have a fun fact for you Chris and I used to work together at NVIDIA what? Yeah Chris was in Vita with me so we inspired to our podcast and he sat right across the cubicle the cubicle right in front of me was Chris

and so I start on Monday and I show up at work and people like introduce me to everyone and then it's like 11 or something and they're like so this is chris's office he's not in yet and so i met chris like the next day or something it was pretty good yeah so what did you do it in video wait wait wait yeah what did you do and why did you leave i mean uh you know seems like a pretty great place to work since i've been there what happened well so uh you know invidia builds things other than GPUs right i don't know honestly yeah i did an ivory tower research yeah so i worked on the first CPU then

Nvidia designed called Project Denver it's on the Wikipedia as you can look it up and so it has a dynamic binary translator that translates from Arm to Arm 64 to internal VLIW architecture it's very exciting

for the idea was that it could translate in theory from other things right so if if you're familiar with history I'm not I'm not so do you know Transmetta Transmeta? Yeah Transmeta was the It was like a company competing with meta.

It was the hot startup in the 90s. That's in 1900s, 1990. And it was, Linus used to work there, Linus Torval's. Yeah. And so it was a company that made an X-D-6 chip that competed with Intel and AMD and VIA at the time. And they were first to market with really low-powered chips. It was really cool stuff. they shipped two CPUs that they designed

and then the third one kind of didn't really make it because reasons but some of the IP ended up in other places including the type of stuff that we were doing it was the reason that Intel sued them you're the Nvidia representative you can tell me why Intel sued Nvidia I would not be my place to say this

but there was a lawsuit at the time I worked at Nvidia and there was a settlement for around a billion dollars which is public you can go and read the settlement and it has interesting clauses in it. And Intel at the time paid Nvidia around a billion dollars for the settlement.

It was around the time they did MCP. So, so net we only gave them $4 billion. No, so they had chipsets. They were like the best chipsets for gaming and stuff. It was really good, and you could plug your GPU into it and stuff. And then there was a lawsuit around it. You could just go look it up online.

It was a good chip set thing that they did. Okay. Yeah. Good history. Well, I left to go to Google. wait you have to go to google and then you went to apple yeah and then i went to apple yeah i see so you were moving up in the because at the time invidia nobody knew who they were well i knew who they were yeah

nobody knew who they were i was i was told i was told by somebody who's at this conference that i should like in 2017 that i should not go work at invidia because they did not have competitive pay and and uh that it was not going to be as good as going to google or amazon or Microsoft or somewhere. But I believe, folks, I believed I thought it was the coolest company, the only company that made True Parallel Hardware. Okay, where were we? Cool story.

I don't know where to go from there. Are you about to tell us anything about your startup? Yeah, it's a physical system startup, and so we build physical things, and you've got to program those things and have a platform to be able to program them. It's very exciting. They build physical things.

Yeah. Build physical things. Yeah, it's nice. Are you allowed to say anything about the tech stack? I mean, we're talking rust. We're talking C++, we're talking carbon. Are you allowed to say anything like that? That doesn't seem like proprietary, you know.

I mean, you've got to use the right tool for the job. So the Python's pretty decent for some AI stuff. There's a good amount of C++, rust. There's great typescript for web-related stuff. Are you just listening off everything or everything you use? We don't use APL. But if you come to my talk tomorrow, have an APL joke you'll like it you'll like it yeah it's a good talk apparently i'm in the talk but

no i showed you the slide you're in the talk yeah as i told them i'll be on a plane so i can't be in his talk no you are in the talk it's done yeah very rude that you would leave before jf's talk i know i know i know i would never miss because jrf famously i think actually this could be wrong i'll cut it if it is you only give your talks once right yeah yeah so i mean the last time i saw a talk of yours live was at c plus plus under the sea I imagine you've given a talk since then, in between, because that was like a couple years ago. No, 2020.

So I guess that's a year and a half from 2025 now. Have you given talks in between? Can we link them in the show notes? Or is this year return from a year and a half? I think I gave a C++ now talk, the safety and security one. The CPP on C1 was my most popular, though. It was a good talk, yeah. That was, like, book-ended with, like, it was, there was three safety and security talks.

Sean gave one, you gave one. I can't remember the third one. I apologize to that person, but I definitely recall... I made a panel. I made a panel also. Was that recorded? Yeah, I think so. I might, was that C++ now?

Yeah, I think so. I might have watched that as well. But I definitely remember enjoying both yours and Sean's. Sean, I mean, Sean's fantastic. He's always got great takes. Anyway, so this is your first talk since... Was it C++ now this year? Honestly.

Two, three years ago. Because I was going to say that, it feels like ages ago when I watched that talk. Anyways, tell us a little bit about your talk. I mean, Victoria, you're speaking tomorrow as well, right? He spoke today. So, wait, we'll go to Vitorio first. Give us a recap. How did your talk go?

And then we'll get a preview of J.F's talk tomorrow. I know... Wait, hold back to... Wait. No, I... Jason's talk is called implicit conversions considered harmful. Your talk is called hoping, noping, what about noping or something like that? Much ado about noping.

So it's a talk about nothing. It's really good. I've been working on it for eight years. Eight years. All right. That's a bit much. But I do recall, I got the nop or the noping correct. We got 50 minutes before this quiz.

Vittorio's talk, I don't think I recall. I definitely didn't see it today. day but tell us how did your talk go what was it about so not only you didn't come to my talk wait what time is it at what time is it at you don't even know if you came too much all no no no i definitely know i wasn't in it i was only in two and a half talks today i'm pretty offended i think i want bryce to ask me questions from now and is that okay what time is it at though what time was it was at 10 30 that's why i wasn't i was running during that he said he would definitely be at my talk which is at the same time so

Yeah, I mean I used to talk we were friends I used to thought we had, you know, something but... There's no way to back on to this one. I know, I know. I mean, the audience heard everything so they can make their own mind, right?

They'll understand this biases. Go to the GitHub discussion and you be the judge. You meet the comic. Anyway, my talk went great. I gave this talk, also CVPCon as a keynote, which was my first ever keynote. So...

Is it online right now? It is online right now. It was shared like immediately afterwards, and please go see it. Let me know if you enjoyed it. It's about data-oriented design. And... Wait, what design?

Data-oriented design. That sounds like the Mike Acton talk of like the CPP on 2014 or something. Exactly. That's the right year. And I actually started with it in my keynote because I was there in person and it was like the personal start on my journey to DOD. I think to this day that is like one of the top five viewed... Is it V?

It's number one. J.F's correcting me. I mean, I'm not wrong in it was the number one. of the top five, but J.F. is qualifying. It is the number one view talk on all of CBPCON videos released in history. Yeah, I feel like Mike's keynote was eye-opening for other people, me included. I do feel like it's very dogmatic onto some stuff, especially regarding C++ feature usage and templates and abstraction. So I try to have a little bit of a more balanced outlook and kind of like balance out DOD with OOP, which are supposed to be more total enemies, but I'm not.

I think they can coexist, and also I believe that there is quite a lot of room for civil plus features and obstructions to actually make your life easier. One of the things I show in the talk, for example, is taking a normal struct and automatically converting it to an SOA layout using reflection even in Salesforce 17, and it's actually one of the... That example is one of the ones that we actually contributed to the whole reflection effort, and that's one of my favorite things. But I'm doing this in Silas Plus 17.

You can do it, you can do it before 2012-76. I did see, was it on LinkedIn, it was some social media platform where you posted, everyone's excited about C++26 reflection, but don't forget, we can do a lot of this stuff. Yeah, that's it, that's it. So it's like everybody is super excited for reflection, but many of the use cases that are very useful with reflection, you can do today. You have boost BFR, you have this weird, arcane magical tricks that you're going to do with templates to even extract names of fields from Strux in a portable way,

and then reflect on those in 17. Or maybe it's 24 for the field names and 17 for aggregates. But still, you have a lot of power today that people maybe don't even know you have, which is a bit of sad because you can do automatic serialization, automatic data layout changing. You can do quite a lot of cool stuff nowadays with what you have at your disposal. That's amazing. And the great news is, I don't know, exactly. All right, JFS is gone.

We won't ever hear about its talk. I mean, I guess he said it was about nothing. He's been working on it for eight years. Seems odd. The great news is that even if NDC Techtown doesn't release the video at the time this is released at some time probably late October, we will have a link to the keynote that was given at CPPCon. And this does sound like a fantastic talk. It's not a repeat or a different edition of Mike Acton's talk.

It is an extension. A less angry version of Mike. Was Mike's talk angry? Victoria gave a less angry version of Mike's talk. Mike was angry. I don't remember much about the thing. He was angry. He was angry?

I feel like I didn't want to do the same thing at Mysacton. I took a different approach where it's like a walk-through. I show people, hey, let's start with an OOP sort of thing, then we benchmark it. We see why it's low. We talk about memory. Then we actually gradually migrate to something more data-oriented. We benchmark it again.

So it's a very kind of like step-by-step approach where you see pedagogically how you can shift your mindset and now that actually affects the final runtime of the project. So I feel like Mike Acton is very angry talk, if you want to call it that way, still has a lot of value, and I recommend people to see it. It's very different thing. So I don't want to, you know, overlap on the same thing. I do just want to say, don't get me wrong.

Well, I do think it was an angry talk. It was one of the best talks I've ever seen. That is up there with Sean Parents, C++ Now, keynote from like 2012 or 2013, the one we always talk about that we love, where he shows, where he basically talks about GP programming in the early days. I feel more than angry, the right word is frustrated, and you can be frustrated for very good reasons, and I feel like that's what motivated Mike.

Well, I was going to say, I don't think there's anything wrong with having a little emotion, a little anger, a little frustration. To be honest, I think I'm way too Canadian nice, and there's times on these podcasts where the voice in my head is like, blah-la-la-la-la-la-la-ha-ha-ha. And literally, my wife, Shima, or I guess fiancé. say soon to be wife, she'll be like, she'll be listening to it in the car and then she'll give me feedback. And then she'll be like, why don't you push back harder? And she'll be,

oh, you know, I completely disagree with the point being made. And she's like, well, why don't you push back? And I was like, well, you know, I don't want to be disagreeable. But the point being is emotion. And it's like, you can still respectfully have like an emotional kind of reaction to someone's opinion and say, listen, you know, I appreciate that's your opinion. But I wholeheartedly think you're completely wrong. And it's actually good for, it's good for ratings, you know. I think in the year of 2025, in the last decade and a half, people are too worried about upsetting listeners and guests and stuff. Like, we've lost the ability to have, like, honest conversations. Anyways, so a goal going forward, or at least she's trying to convince me is,

like, whenever I disagree with whether it's a guest or a host, you just say, listen, I appreciate your point of view, but you're wrong. And you know, and then you go, but respectfully. And anyways, Victoria wants to add to that. Yes, the message, of course, is be angry. That's what we're saying. And also, you said you're Canadian-knives, or you've been very mean to me today. I will not forget that. It is true. I didn't know the name. I knew the name of JF's talk. Well, actually, I didn't know the name of JF's talk,

but I did say I would be at it. And I knew the name of Jason's talk. And Jason, he's not around. I think he's gone. We might talk to him tomorrow. And by we, I mean, me, because Bryce is going to be gone. But I did not know. I mean, I do recall reviewing the schedule, but I was trying to fit in a 20K run. And so I had to choose. is a two-talk slot, and the morning slot was the one. And if it makes you feel better, I miss lunch today because I missed... I thought if I showed up before, it doesn't.

All right. Vittoria says it does not make him feel better. We will rectify this situation by going and watching the CPP keynote, either on the train to Oslo or sometime before then. Wait, wait, wait, was you going to talk, a keynote? So it's already online. That's when he said keynote, I was like, a lot of times now, C++ now, CPPCon. Here, here's a hot take and a disagreement.

Stop doing this thing where you wait like four months and then you roll out talks like what I get, you think it's good for the algorithm, but you're upsetting, you're loyal, like, watcher fans. It's not about the algorithm. It's not? It's not about the algorithm. It's about selling in-person tickets.

If they put the video as up immediately, the thinking is, people are less likely to come in person. If you want to see the keynote without a four-month delay, you've got to come in person. that's a broken mindset though because people I mean at least people that have been to a you don't go to the conference for the talks you go to the conference for the conversations the hallway track I mean honestly the most valuable thing about this trip was our conversation that we had in Copenhagen over that dinner and I explained to you the iterator invalidation thing

and you were like that doesn't sound like an iterator invalidation thing since then I've gone and fixed that issue it's as JF says the GPU goes burr and we've got our row wise softmax working in two kernels. It's beautiful folks, and I am more confident about this library that we're launching than ever. We haven't talked about it yet, but the point being, that has nothing to do about, it's the in-person conversations that you have with people. It's not about the talks that you watch. I mean, admittedly, you do learn stuff from the talks you watch, but like the most valuable stuff is these moments right here. All right, we're headed to Victoria because he's the guest. So I'm going to organize a conference with no talks. It's going to be 3K per entry, and you're going

beat here, right? Honestly, that is like, you're joking, that's a pretty decent idea. Like, they have had these kind of co-located, like, what do they call, unconferences where there are no scheduled talks, but they just get together a, yeah, there's a space, and so you'll have this kind of either one or two rooms, and then at some point they'll do, like, hey, does someone have something they want to show or whatever, show and tell? Or maybe someone does have a presentation they want to show. Like, I think that those are a lot hard.

to like fund and to get people to show up to but like it's a joke but I think there's actually a ton of value in that kind of stuff because if you can make it work right it is the best form of like unstructured conversations blah blah brako groups anyways so I think you could be massively on I mean it's not my point these things exist like unconferences are a thing I went to one for I don't remember what but it was some some Google thing so I uh I don't know we've mentioned this in the podcast before, but me and Ramon and I are in the nascent stages of planning a New York-based conference, and we keep having this conversation about maybe we just won't have keynotes because I feel like a Vittorio keynote's going to be good, but I feel like

on average, I am disappointed with keynotes at a lot of conferences. No, legitimately, I am disappointed with a lot of keynotes because I think that oftentimes they give people keynotes and they got an open check about what they're going to present. And there's no review or feedback process on the keynote. And so sometimes you get keynotes where they're just not so good. I will say there was that, was it a blog post or conference trip report? At some point I posted somewhere, for the love of God. And I'll call out the conference.

It was CPPCon. Please use a monospace font for your code examples. just because it's in a slide deck doesn't mean and everybody I mean calling out a very specific person No no I would

Three of the five keynotes did this And one of them Everybody's gonna think you're calling out of I mean that's fine I honestly I honestly don't care We just finished saying That it's okay To have disagreements with people

And honestly using a monosee spot It's not a lot of work It's not a lot of work folks You can do it I can do it we can all do it And I don't Unless if your talk is about Like what's the guys

named Brett Victor and he has this whole thing is that like we're stuck in this like page of text everything is blah blah blah it should be a newspaper some things should be bigger like the function names that unless if you have a talk about the way that we're formatting and styling code I want to see a monospace font it's easier to pattern recognize like it's just it's just the the coding standard there's no IDE or like editor or any online tool that offers you a non monospace font and when I see it I'm just like what I would doing here? And it is just laziness. I'm going to be honest, it's just laziness. You're copy and you posting and you're not choosing the font. I guarantee you, Victoria's talk, it had a monospace font.

I can say that confidently because, well, actually, I'm 99% confident. Victoria can let us know. I just want to add that, like, you mentioned there's no editor, but my university professor's my favorite editor, Microsoft Word, comes with a non-monospace font, and all the code was written there. But he didn't use one, but yeah, yeah. I agree. would you like in general, I feel like is the bare minimum you can do to make your slight more readable and making code monospace. And I'm still surprised that sometimes even very technically good talks, you know, completely do not care about the aspect of visual presentation and making things more readable, which is a bit of a shame. Yeah. I mean, I do think,

and then this is, we're in hot take territory, folks. I do really think it is just like a lack of effort. It's not that it's not a good talk. It's just literally like it's extra effort to go and change the font and they just copy pasta and they're done with it. Right now I'm on Linux folks and I make my talks in Microsoft 365 PowerPoint, the web version, and I lose my indentation. I get the I get the syntax isolating. I've learned a trick from Ashman here. He's not saying much, but he's offering a lot and he taught me the trick on how to, and actually I'll tell you the trick. You got a copy to Google slides first and then to Microsoft online. I haven't tested it yet, but I trust that it works.

But for the talk that I gave at the meetup at Roku and the meetup in Copenhagen, I went in painstakingly. Every code example, I went and I typed space by space for every single indentation. And I tried to choose code examples that had the minimum level of nestedness, because if you get three levels, that's 12 spaces I have to type. But that's how much I care. Like, it is my fault for not suffering through Windows, because Windows has the copy pasta working correctly.

But the point being, folks, is you should care. You should care. Changing the font is a single click. We got multiple people with comments here. I'm going to make a certain specific coworker of ours. Listen to this. Because there's a certain slide deck which has code, which not only is in a non-monospace font, it's also got no indentation. It's all on the left line.

We're handing it to Vittoria, but I'm going to beep this out. Who is it? I'll beep it out. I'll beep it out. I'll beep it out. You're not getting it from me. Yeah, that's unsurprising. It's beeped out, though. Don't worry. Because we're talking about venting our frustrations, PowerPoint, it lacks one of the most basic features that every program has, which is resizing text proportionally. Like, if you drag from

the corner of the text box, it's just going to resize the boundaries, and it's going to reflow the text. And I like morphing. I like when I have Slizer move around and Code Movers around. So at the beginning, I used to do this. I used to convert everything. single text box into an image so that I can resize it proportionally. And whenever I had to make a change in the keynote, I had to do it from scratch, change the code, and then reconvert to an image and morph it again. And then realized, I'm a programmer. I can fix things.

So I made an ad-DIN for PowerPoint that allows you to actually proportionally resize text. And, you know, do you have no excuse? If you want to make it look good, you can even go beyond and just fix PowerPoint. Which Microsoft should do, honestly. It's been 20 years, 40 years, and still you cannot resize things properly. Unfortunately, that makes me frustrated. I'll pay you like 20 euros for the plug-in. I was going to say, is it public?

I mean, that is an amazing point. I mean, I think that the text, if you resize it, yeah, yeah, the quiz is starting. So we are ending this conversation. It's good timing because it's been 45 minutes. But I'm pretty sure if you resize it, it just goes outside the bounds of the box. And so you actually only have to, but it is a good point.

It should fix that. We didn't even talk about Vitorio's background and, like, game design. But that's such a, now that you've said that, like, I definitely want that. And I haven't realized until now that that's something that I needed. We have to have Vitorio clearly on the pod because Bryce and I care deeply about PowerPoint. We spend an inordinate amount of time. There's a couple episodes that I've titled like C++X or Y. It's a 40-minute podcast.

30 minutes are talking about PowerPoint and really should have PowerPoint in the title. Anyways, maybe we'll chat with you afterwards, Vitori. Thank you for coming on. We'll get you on a formal interview. Thanks for coming on. I would love that. Thank you so much. If people want to hire you to do training, where do they find you?

Yeah, so I have a link called Romeo. Dot Training, which is my, let's say, personal web page where I describe my services and you have a contact form there. But you can also find me on Twitter, LinkedIn, anywhere. I'd be super happy to chat with you. And that is Romeo like Romeo and Juliet, Romeo like the Shakespeare play. Dot training. No one's confused about Romeo, my guy.

Anyways, have a good one. Be sure to check these show notes. either in your podcast app or at ADSP thepodcast.com for links to anything we mentioned in today's episode, as well as a link to a get-up discussion where you can leave thoughts, comments, and questions. Thanks for listening. We hope you enjoyed and have a great day. Low quality, high quantity. That is the tagline of our podcast. It's not the tagline. Our tagline is chaos with sprinkles of information.