CppCon 2016

C++ does not yet have complete introspection (reflection), but in many cases it may be easy to complete. We will present an example of what we think is is a general method whenever data specifications may be converted to C++ through a code generator. We have done this for processing financial market data very sensitive to latencies and obtained huge advantages of
* Economy of effort
* Performance
* Reliability
* Extensibility
over any other option we considered. We will show:
* How we converted the specification of market data from an important exchange, CME MDP3, into C++ types and a minimal set of variadic templates that give us full introspection capabilities
* The code and the techniques to implement generic introspecting software components, including these concrete examples:
* Converting any value that belongs to the specification into string
* Testing for whether the value is null in any of the three ways the specification allows encoding of null values
* Applying design patterns such as flyweights to traverse the data with zero or minimal performance cost
* Subscription mechanisms

We hope these code examples will show how straightforward and maintainable metaprogramming techniques can emulate introspection for truly significant quality gains.

Support code at github:
https://github.com/thecppzoo/cppcon2016/