Living in the future: Using C++26 at work

I recently contributed a guest post on my employer’s blog about the importance of the almost-feature-complete C++26 draft standard:

“Sea change in C++: Why opportunities abound”

It starts by summarizing a talk I gave recently, about how C++26 is poised to do what C++11 did over a decade ago: usher in a new era of C++ code style. Just as we can now glance at 10 or 20 lines and quickly recognize “modern C++” as C++11-era code, soon we’ll be able to do the same with code that uses std::execution, contracts, memory safety improvements, and (fingers crossed) reflection, and quickly see it’s “modern” C++26-era code. A second wave of modernization, marked by a visibly refreshed language and style.

One thing I’ve appreciated here at Citadel is how aggressively the key advances are being adopted in our live trading systems. We already use C++26’s std::execution  in production for an entire asset class, and as the foundation of our new messaging infrastructure. That’s possible because we’ve had our own in-house implementation running for several years now—thanks, Gašper and Bronek! Next, we’ll be pushing hard to adopt draft C++26’s new hardened standard library and contracts in our production systems, which were just voted into C++26 at our latest WG21 meeting in February.

This doesn’t mean we throw caution to the wind or reach for just any shiny new feature the moment it appears. But when key features are ready and delivering real value today, and we can get them with a little extra effort, there’s no reason to wait until tomorrow to use them. One of the nice things about that model is we get to “live in the future” by using those key features in production early, to get the benefits sooner and also to start building experience now with the cool things everyone will be using routinely everywhere soon.

The future’s not quite here. But for some features, we can already write production code as if it is. It’s illuminating; personally, I’m learning more about std::execution now that I’m in an environment where it’s being used for real. Fun times for C++!