CppCon 2025 Changing /std:c++14 to /std:c++20 - How Hard Could It Be? -- Keith Stockdale

Registration is now open for CppCon 2025! The conference starts on September 13 and will be held in person in Aurora, CO. To whet your appetite for this year’s conference, we’re posting some upcoming talks that you will be able to attend this year. Here’s another CppCon future talk we hope you will enjoy – and register today for CppCon 2025!

Changing /std:c++14 to /std:c++20 - How Hard Could It Be?

Monday, September 15 15:15 - 16:15 MDT

by Keith Stockdale

Summary of the talk:

Rare put in huge amounts of work to bring Sea of Thieves to PlayStation 5 and to upgrade from the old XDK and UWP platforms to the new GDK platform. In this session, Rare will discuss why they made the decision to take this opportunity to also upgrade from C++14 to C++20. It shouldn’t be much harder than changing a 14 to a 20, right? How hard could it be?

Rare will discuss all the work that was involved in upgrading their language standard and share some anecdotes of some of the challenges that were met along the way. They will go through the benefits that they have felt from this upgrade along with some plans for continuing this work in the future.

Keith Stockdale is a Northern Irish senior software engineer who has been working on the Engine and Rendering teams at Rare Ltd for the last 8 years working on Sea of Thieves. At Rare, Keith's main areas of focus are involved in maintaining and creating general purpose simulations that run on the GPU. For example, he is the owner of the GPU particle system that drives the visual effects in Sea of Thieves. Keith is enthusiastic about promoting writing good quality code, whether it is running on the CPU on the GPU. He is driven towards ensuring that the code-bases he works in are enjoyable to work in for all current and future developers on his team.

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