Meetup #9: Bazel and C++ Library Maintenance

Please join us for our ninth official C++ Helsinki Meetup! Once again we meet for a series of talks and discussion about the C++ programming language.

This time we are hosted by ICEYE, a Finnish microsatellite company that owns the world's largest synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite constellation and provides high-quality satellite data to governments and commercial industries. ICEYE is hosting us at their office in Espoo. Anyone interested in the C++ programming language is welcome to attend!

IMPORTANT:

Please note that we have an attendance limit this time as the venue can only fit a limited amount of people. People signing up after the limit is exhausted will go on the wait list. So please only RSVP if you actually intend to show up, and edit your RSVP in case you find out you can't come after all!

Code of Conduct: By attending C++ Helsinki you agree to abide by the Berlin Code of Conduct. It is a primary goal of our meetup that our attendees feel safe, welcome, and included. If you have any concerns at all, please do not hesitate to contact the organizers Timur Doumler and Jeroen Akershoek here on meetup.com.

This month we again have two excellent C++ talks for you:

Evgenii Novozhilov: Using Bazel for C++ development and more

Bazel is a language-agnostic build system initially designed by Google in the 2010s. This year, Bazel turned 9, and many projects and companies are adopting it. Bazel has built-in support for various features like caching, remote execution, dependency management, and cross-platform builds. And, of course, Bazel supports C++ with rules_cc. In this talk, we'll cover Bazel's basic concepts, explain how to set up and manage your C++ projects using Bazel, explore how to extend Bazel’s capabilities with the Starlark language, and discuss how it can be leveraged to optimize C++ development workflows.

Evgenii leads the CLion Build Tools team at JetBrains and maintains various build tool integrations in CLion, a cross-platform IDE for C and C++. With almost ten years of experience in C++ development, Evgenii has recently shifted focus to Kotlin and Java to work on enhancing CLion’s capabilities. As of early 2023, he has been working on developing the Bazel plugin for CLion, collaborating with Google and other open-source maintainers on the project.

Mark Gillard - On Building Blocks and Kitchen Sinks: Maintaining a low-level "core utils" C++ library

Mark maintains a low-level, standard-library-adjacent "core utils" library at ICEYE, containing backports of newer standard library features, cross-platform abstractions, miscellaneous helpers, and lots of template soup. In his talk he'll give a brief overview of some of the library's offerings, as well as some best practices and gotchas to consider when creating and maintaining this style of library at a high level of quality.

Mark Gillard is a Senior Flight Software Engineer at ICEYE, a Finnish microsatellite company based in Espoo. Prior to his current role, he was the lead developer on a realtime soft tissue physics engine for Osgenic, a Helsinki-based surgical simulation and training company. Before coming to Finland, Mark was a teacher, researcher and consultant at Flinders University in South Australia, working with haptic controllers to find novel ways of modeling and teaching different surgical interactions. Mark first learned to code as a teenager, making mods in UnrealScript for Unreal Tournament 2004, and these days almost all of his work is C++.

Schedule:

17:30 Doors
18:00 Introduction by organisers & hosts
18:15 Evgenii Novozhilov: Using Bazel for C++ development and more
19:00 Mark Gillard - On Building Blocks and Kitchen Sinks: Maintaining a low-level "core utils" C++ library