Bio
Herb Sutter is a technical fellow at Citadel Securities, designer of several Standard C++ features, and chair of the ISO C++ committee and the Standard C++ Foundation. His current interest is simplifying C++.
Abstract
In June 2025, C++ crossed a Rubicon: it handed us the keys to its own machinery. For the first time, C++ can describe itself—and generate more. The first compile-time reflection features in draft C++26 mark the most transformative turning point in our language’s history by giving us the most powerful new engine for expressing efficient abstractions that C++ has ever had, and we’ll need the next decade to discover what this rocket can do.
This talk is a high-velocity tour through what reflection enables today in C++26, and what it will enable next. The point of this talk isn’t to immediately grok any given technique or example. The takeaway is bigger: to leave all of us dizzy from the sheer volume of different examples, asking again and again, “Wait, we can do that now?!”—to fire up our imaginations to discover and develop this enormous new frontier together, and chart the strange new worlds C++ reflection has just opened for us to explore.
Reflection has arrived, more is coming, and the frontier is open. Let’s go.
