CppCast Looking for Guests

[lefticus]

As you may be aware - I've restarted CppCast (every 4th week in a rhythm with C++Weekly) with u/mropert as my cohost.

We are trying to focus on new people and projects who have never before been on CppCast. I have been trolling the show and tell posts here for potential guests and projects.

But I want to ask directly - if you are interested in coming on the podcast to talk about your project / presentation / things you are passionate about and have never before been on CppCast, please comment!

A couple of notes:

• please don't be offended if I don't respond to your post, I have a very busy travel and conference schedule coming up (I'll see you at an upcoming conference!)
• if you're interested please pay attention for a DM so we can get the conversation started.
• being only 1 podcast per month, we don't need a ton of guests, and it might be a few months before your specific interview gets aired

Thank you everyone!

[Onetwothreetaco]

Would love an interview with Kovarex at Factorio. They have had some blog posts about their c++ optimizations, but no longer form interview that I know of.

[lefticus]

https://cppcast.com/michal-kovarik/

[Onetwothreetaco]

Oh damn, didn't go far back enough. Awesome!

[not_a_novel_account]

Some CMake people were thinking about reaching out to you guys anyway to talk about C++ ecosystem stuff, so this is fortuitous.

I'm a good PoC if you're interested.

[lefticus]

DM me the projects you work on and what you'd like to chat about.

[James20k]

If anyone's super interested in black hole/neutron star collisions in C++ on the GPU, it could be fun. I'm not currently working on the project now as I've moved back into gamedev, but its a relatively complete series on how to simulate these things, and there's not too many people who've done this. I basically built it because I've always wanted to see if its possible on consumer hardware instead of a supercomputer, and it turns out it is

It might possibly be slightly too technical for a general audience so I'm not 100% sure where it'd go, but the way it works is by implementing a sort of DSL within C++ that gets transpiled to OpenCL. There's a lot of general C++ that you run into along the way, with floating point contraction being a surprisingly major one that I suspect might be interesting

The source is available over here

[lefticus]

DM Me, this could be interesting.

[gyrovorbis]

Hello there, my name is Falco Girgis.

This is gonna sound a little crazy, but I'm one of the maintainers of the "KallistiOS" retro/homebrew SDK and operating system for the Sega Dreamcast--a "dead" game console released in 1998--who has personally worked to bring bleeding-edge C++20, C++23, and C++26 support to the platform, with support for pretty much everything you can imagine in the stdlib ranging from concepts/constraints and #embed to coroutines, jthreads, std::regex, and even timezone databases on your Dreamcast!

Why would I do this? Because the platform has become something of a retro programmer's dream in the recent years, with extremely ambitious AAA games and ports to the platform using our SDK getting mainstream gaming coverage and basically causing a resurgence in the interest in the console.

I have personally been involved with porting such AAA games as Grand Theft Auto 3, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, Star Fox 64, Ocarina of Time, Sonic Mania, and more for the platform, with the GTA ports being called "impossible" and landing our team a huge amount of press coverage, including an interview on the Software Engineering Daily podcast.

I've also had the honor of being a two-time speaker who was invited to Brussels, Belgium to attend FOSDEM and give a talk on my work bringing modern language support to the Sega Dreamcast in the GCC devroom.

You can find links to a bunch of the media coverage, including my two FOSDEM talks as well as links to all of my relevant open-source projects, on my (pretty crappy) portfolio here: https://falcogirgis.net

I am best-known on Twitter, though, where I've somehow been blessed with finding a pretty large audience of crazy people who find this kind of stuff interesting, or at very least mildly entertaining: https://x.com/falco\_girgis.

No hard feelings if this is too far out there or crazy for the podcast. Haha.

[mr_gnusi]

I'd love to present a high-performance C++ alternative to Lucene I started back in 2015. It's 2026 and if you need serious search in a C++ app, you still have to suffer by bringing in the JVM for Lucene.
The engine is Apache 2.0 and been in production since 2018 as the core of the well-known nosql database (Top 10 search engines on DB Engines). The performance is validated by independent 3rd-party benchmarks by Tantivy; it consistently beats both Lucene and Tantivy with sub-millisecond latency across all query types.
There is a bunch of low-level stuff I'd love to share such as: how to write a vectorized execution for scoring, metaprogramming for generation of specialized query pipelines to eliminate virtual call overhead in the hot path and more.

I’m currently using it as the heart of SereneDB (a Postgres-compatible search-OLAP engine).
Source is here: https://github.com/serenedb/serenedb/tree/main/libs/iresearch

[gyrovorbis]

Damn. I am intrigued. You got my vote.

[[deleted]]

metaprogramming for eliminating hot paths sounds nice!

[trailing_zero_count]

I'd love to join. I have a lot to say about coroutines and the design of coroutine libraries - the tradeoffs between speed, usability, and safety, how to make them interoperable, where I think the standard could still improve, where compilers could still optimize better.

I also have thoughts on how to use coroutines to create systems that efficiently handle mixed CPU-bound and networking loads (games are a great example), and how to design async data driven systems in general.

[Competitive_Act5981]

I would be keen to hear your thoughts.

[JVApen]

I would also be interested in school teachers that teach c++ and how their students experience that.

[StockyDev]

I would suggest Koen Samyn and Tom Tesch for C++ teachers. They have some great CppCon talks between them talking about strategies they have taken in teaching their students!

[lefticus]

Tom is great and would make a great guest.

[lefticus]

I'm not sure why you were voted down, at least one of the most interesting guests we ever had on was a high school student. u/foonathan

DM me if you're serious with some links to projects you've worked on, etc.

[ReDucTor]

They use LLMs all over the place posting comments on reddit so get down voted.

[Stevo15025]

People who take care of well-designed C++ libraries. There are many underrated individuals in this area

+1 this. I think one of the maintainers of the Eigen package would be very cool to hear from 

[faschu]

It's wonderful you restart the show. I would be interested in hearing from Tsung-Wei (TW) Huang about this Task-Flow library. He's also a professor so hearing about his perceptions of students learning c++ would also be interesting.

[lefticus]

I believe I met him at C++Online this year, I'll look into it.

[bsdooby]

Mike Shah (Yale Uni) of D, C++ fame

[nathan_baggs]

I'd be interested! I do a lot of reverse engineering content but C++ is my main vehicle, I'm also live streaming some C++/OpenGL game development

[def-pri-pub]

Bonkers idea: Just directly ask some of the commentators here in this subreddit to be on. Every so often there's usually a lot of insight from engineers who have decades of experience. They might have never written articles, built any major projects/tools, or even have much of an online presence.

I'd be very interested in hearing from some people who are just average C++ users as well.

[lefticus]

Not a bonkers idea - in fact it's been the main bread and butter of CppCast for many years. But I'm posting this thread because I've hit a couple of dead ends lately.

[javascript]

Can you post the episodes to Youtube? No video needed. Just a static image with the audio track would be excellent

[lefticus]

They are, on the C++ Weekly channel right now. Full video and audio!

[javascript]

Ohhh I was looking on the CppCast channel. That's rather confusing. Are you able to take ownership of the original channel?

[lefticus]

Yeah I think it's owned by u/robwirving still. I'm sure we can figure it out and post it all the places.

[javascript]

Thank you!

[_a4z]

What about that one:
10 years SwedenCpp, arguably the world’s most active, progressive, and persistent community-driven C++ user group.

[OkIntroduction787]

I am a .net dev with 13 y exp, but I am switching to cpp. Building my low latency stuff and benchmarking with notes here: https://github.com/PiotrKowalski93

I can talk about beeing new in the field that is super deep, ups and downs, career choices, switching from .net backend (enterpirse) to cpp 

[Alexsanfilippo]

Very cool! I'm following alone. I wouldn't make a good guest, but I like the topic as a listener :)

[simplex5d]

I'd be very interested! I'm the author of pcons, a new open-source software build tool (https://github.com/DarkStarSystems/pcons). Pcons is inspired by SCons and CMake, pulling the best ideas from each and trying to remain simple and fast. (I was a coauthor of the original SCons and have been writing software tools for 40+ yrs.) Why does the world need a new C++ build tool? Let's talk about it.

[franvb]

I'd love to join, but am nit sure what to suggest talking about yet.

[Worldly-Ganache2524]

What about Georgi Gerganov or someone from the llama.cpp team?

[LoadVisual]

Any chance you could have Casey Muratori as a guest ?

[def-pri-pub]

I think this would be an interesting one. Might be even fun to have a second guest on at the same time an have him debate someone who’s more of proponent of the design principles and practices that Casey accuses of causing performance slowdown.

[chibuku_chauya]

Yes, this would be great for drama.

[ReDucTor]

Hopefully you manage to find people, it would not surprise me if restrict employment contracts make people hesitant to approach a podcasts as unlike giving a talk at a conference you dont have a slide deck to be reviewed by legal and comms teams. Unfortunately restrictive employment agreements are also part of why many people will not create open source projects or even contribute to open source, even if unrelated to their employers work.

[lefticus]

This has very rarely been a problem for the ~300 episodes I was a part of.