CppCon 2018: Timur Doumler & Dmitry Kozhevnikov “Parsing C++”

Timur Doumler and Dmitry Kozhevnikov explain why C++ is notoriously difficult to parse, detailing its context-dependent grammar and ambiguities.

CppCon.org — Presentation Slides, PDFs, Source Code and other presenter materials are available at: github.com/CppCon/CppCon2018 — C++ is a notoriously hard language to parse. Its grammar is highly context-dependent and ambiguous, and cannot be parsed without semantic analysis and arbitrarily long lookahead. Not only programmers, but also compilers (and their authors) often struggle with interpreting certain C++ constructs correctly. This talk sheds some light on the grammar of C++ and why parsing it is hard. We will discuss which of these problems are inherited from C, and which arise due to features unique to C++. We will also look at a reasonably easy-to-parse subset of C++ (and whether it ever occurs in real life). Most importantly, we will talk about why all this matters for the practical C++ developer, and not just for compiler writers. And of course, we will also show plenty of surprising, brain-twisting code snippets. This talk is aimed at general C++ programmers and does not require any expert knowledge about parsing and semantic analysis. — Timur Doumler, JetBrains Timur Doumler works at JetBrains, where he develops the C++ frontend for CLion, the cross-platform C++ IDE. In the past he has spent much time working in the audio tech industry and has written code for the JUCE framework. Timur is an active member of the ISO C++ committee and passionate about clean code, good tools, and the evolution of the C++ language. He regularly speaks at conferences and enjoys C++ community work, currently serving as an organiser and program chair for the Audio Developer Conference and as moderator on includecpp.org. Dmitry Kozhevnikov Software Developer, JetBrains Dmitry works on C++ support in the CLion IDE by JetBrains, covering various aspects like the in-house C++ engine, inspections and refactoring engine, and clang integration. — Videos Filmed & Edited by Bash Films: BashFilms.com Work at Hudson River Trading (HRT): tinyurl.com/safxfctf --- Videos Filmed & Edited by Bash Films: BashFilms.com