Title: Modernising Asychronous C++

Speaker: Lee Howes, Facebook

Abstract: In C++11, C++ finally officially discovered concurrency. The advent of an official memory model and atomic operations made possible what had earlier relied on implementation-defined behaviour. In C++17, C++ acquired parallel algorithms – a very basic subset of what OpenMP offers, but a start towards parallelism in the C++ standard. C++20 will get coroutines – finally in-language async/await syntax. The last few years has been a long mission in trying to define concurrency abstractions and a wider set of parallel algorithms. In this talk I’ll give a little history, some idea of why I and why Facebook cares about moving C++ into the future, and some idea of where we may take it.

Biography: Lee Howes did his undergraduate degree in DoC, and a PhD with Professor Paul Kelly in programming models for parallel computing. He spent 6 years working on the boundary of hardware and software, defining software acceleration standards in the Khronos Group and HSA Foundation, at various times editing the OpenCL and SYCL specifications and defining memory consistency models for GPUs and building cache architecture. He currently leads Facebook’s C++ language and libraries team, helping Facebook advance a vision of native compilation for large scale distributed, heterogeneous systems.