The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis
The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis
Authors: Nevin Liber (Argonne National Laboratory (ANL)), Michael Wong (Yetiware), Hal Finkel (DOE Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research), Bryce Adelstein-Lelbach (NVIDIA Corporation), Damien Lebrun-Grandie (Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)), Christian Trott (Sandia National Laboratories)
Abstract: C++ was named the second most popular programming language in 2025, according to the TIOBE Index of language popularity. C and C++ are used in 79.4% of parallel programming languages, based on the Hyperion Research HPC Briefing at ISC 2021.
C++26 is an exciting release for the HPC C++ developer community, with new features including reflection, contracts, erroneous behavior, linear algebra, SIMD, and structured concurrency, amongst others.
This BoF will pull together important leaders and contributors within the ISO C++ Standards Committee who are responsible for key features such as ML, executors, mdspan, inplace_vector, library, concurrency, parallelism, and GPU support.
Long Description: We propose a Birds of a Feather (BoF) session at Supercomputing HPC to discuss the ongoing evolution of the ISO C++ standard with the HPC C++ developer community.
C++26 has shaped up to be an exciting release, with much benefit to HPC developers. Reflection (adopted in Sofia ‘25), is a game changer in that it fundamentally changes what we can express with C++. On the correctness, safety and security fronts, Contracts (Hagenberg ‘25) and Erroneous Behavior (Tokyo ‘24) vastly improve the reliability of C++. Safety Profiles (Hagenberg ‘25) are heading towards a White Paper to make them available sooner rather than later.
On the library side of things, C++26 has added Linear Algebra (Kona ‘23), SIMD (Kona ‘24), std::execution / structured concurrency framework / senders & receivers (St. Louis ‘24), inplace_vector (St. Louis ‘24), hazard pointers (Varna ‘23) and RCU / Read-Copy Update (Varna ‘23), just to name a few. Plus Standard Library Hardening (Hagenberg ‘25) turns many common standard library precondition violations into a contract violation, based on the real world hardening already in libc++ and building upon the Contracts facility. There is also atomic min.max, better mdspan CTAD, padded mdspan layout, saturation arithmetic and random number generation improvements.
These features significantly improve the portability and performance of HPC applications in particular when targeting modern heterogeneous supercomputers with hardware accelerators.
According to the Tiobe Index (July 2025), C++ is the most popular language after Python. C++ has never been more relevant for modern development and for HPC. We will discuss C++26 as well as where we see its future heading.
After the last eight years’ (SC17- SC24) successful C++ for HPC BoF, there is popular demand for continuing updates on the progress of adding HPC capabilities into ISO C++. This is especially important with the increasing use of C++ within DOE and around the world.
Fresh from the WG21 meeting two weeks earlier, this BoF will pull together important leaders and contributors within ISO C++ Standards Committee while continuing to poll for audience participation and response, answering key design questions based on the open community question banks that were collected from the audience last year but were not answered due to lack of time.
This feedback will help us add the best capabilities into future ISO C++ suitable for HPC, building on the many current languages/libraries that pre-date and support this effort that have implemented heterogeneous and distributed C++ features (e.g. Kokkos, Raja, SYCL, HiP, HPX, C++AMP, HCC, Boost.Compute and CUDA). This BoF will address the needs of the HPC community where a number of C++ frameworks have been developed for multi-threaded and distributed applications. The C++11/14/17/20/23/26 international standards have introduced new tools for parallel programming, concurrency (Concurrency TS2).
This BoF is targeted to developers of C++ based programming models, users and designers of distributed and heterogeneous programming models for C/C++, ISO standard members, DOE and worldwide research lab members (e.g. CERN, BSC, CSSC) with workloads in C++ looking for a native language solution.
Website: https://isocpp.org