Homepage of Dr. Zoltán Porkoláb

A Brief History of Bjarne Stroustrup, the Creator of C++

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 01:00:00 +0100

A Brief History of Bjarne Stroustrup, the Creator of C++

2025 Projekt Forum

Fri, 19 Dec 2025 18:00:00 +0100

The 2025 Autumn Project Forum

The project forum video is available here:

video

Research site debate of Kristóf Umann's PhD thesis

Thu, 18 Dec 2025 13:00:00 +0100

The research site debate of the PhD thesis of my PhD student Kristóf Umann will start on Thursday, December 18, 12:00h in the Faculty Library on the first floor of the southern building.

When, where

Thursday, December 18, 2025. 12:00h, at the Library of the Faculty of Informatics, 1nd floor of the southern building 1117 Budapest, Pázmány Péter sétány 1/C

2025 October 21: C++ meetup

Tue, 21 Oct 2025 19:00:00 +0200

Budapest C++ meetup

Please register for the event!

Link to the meetup

When, where

Wednesday, October 8, 2025.

17:30 Doors Open
18.00-20:00 Talks
Until 21:00 Networking

Location: Create26, Király u. 26, Budapest

Lectures

Jonathan Müller – Software Engineer @ think-cell Talk: Cache-Friendly C++ We all love std::vector\—but do we truly know why it’s usually the best choice? Jonathan will unpack what it means for data structures to be cache-friendly, starting from the basics of CPU caches, their benefits, and the performance traps they can create. You’ll learn how to structure your programs and data to make the most of cache hierarchies, what data-oriented design really means in C++, and how to avoid common pitfalls that lead to slowdowns.

Sándor Dargó – Senior Engineer @ Spotify Talk: Strongly Typed Containers How far should you go with strong typing in C++? Sándor explores the trade-offs and techniques of building strongly typed containers—from inheritance pitfalls and private inheritance to composition and open-source solutions. Learn when to bend STL’s design rules, and when to steer clear.

Marcell Juhász – Senior Embedded Engineer @ Zühlke Engineering Talk: Hacking and Securing C++ Marcell will walk us through the world of C++ vulnerabilities using a minimal embedded device as the playground. From buffer overflows to stack manipulation, you’ll see how classic attacks work in practice—and more importantly, how to prevent them with modern C++ techniques like RAII, smart pointers, and bounded containers. Expect hands-on examples that will leave you with a deeper understanding of memory safety and practical strategies to build robust, secure applications.

Links

Link to the event

2025 October 8: C++ meetup in Ericsson House

Wed, 08 Oct 2025 19:00:00 +0200

The Hungarian C++ community restarts the C++ meetups

Please register for the event!

Link to the meetup

When, where

Wednesday, October 8, 2025.

17:30: Doors Open
18:00 – 19:30: Talks + Q&A
Until 21:00: Networking

Location: Ericsson House, Magyar Tudósok Körútja 11, 1117 Budapest

Lectures

Richárd Szalay: The Strangely Familiar Practice of Programming in a Parallel-First World

It is increasingly clear that the 2000s-era technique of abusing Moore’s Law and increasing computational power by “just having more CPU cores” is reaching its limits. The workloads computers face these days yearn to extract the performance benefits from parallelism, but the hardware world has left them behind. While application-specific accelerators (GPU, NPU, TPU) are the big things of today, there are both hardware architectural quirks with these technologies, and the way we have to write software for these accelerators (by having to use custom libraries, write clunky program structures, keep in mind various assumptions, or even dive into debugging hell) so far also prevented a “one size fits all” solution from emerging.

At Flow-Computing, Richárd and his colleagues work on bringing to reality the Parallel Processing Unit (PPU), a flexible and programmable parallel computing solution to revolutionise the performance of both everyday and specific applications. And with it, also shine a light on a “parallel-first” world, where they switch the assumption from “sequential until proven parallel” to “parallel unless proven sequential”.

Unfortunately, change is complex, and complexity – just like energy and potholes – can not be lost or gained, only displaced… Join this talk for a journey to see how parallel machines, both abstract and implementation, can retain today’s guise and yet transform the way we write software. Or, if anything, to peek at the next generation of footguns.

Bio:

Richárd received Ph.D. degree in 2024 at Eötvös Loránd University. With partnership in Ericsson he worked on static analyses, source code transformation and comprehension as part of the CodeChecker project. He presented his results at highly acclaimed venues, as multiple times at C++Now and IEEE’s software engineering conferences. Since September 2024, he has been working for Flow-Computing as the language and compiler front-end specialist.

Botond István Horváth: OVERLORD – an overload inspector in C++ to understand and measure

Function overloading is a well-known technique available in most major programming languages, including C++, to facilitate compile-time polymorphism. Due to the complex requirements imposed by the C++ Language Standard, the behaviour of overload resolution can be surprising even for experienced C++ developers. This is exacerbated by the fact that if an unexpected function is selected in an overloaded situation, most compilers do not explain why. In addition, an overabundance of candidates can be a compilation time bottleneck. Despite its widespread usage, there are not many tools to help programmers analyse overload usage in a software project.

In this presentation Botond introduces an overloading inspector tool, OVERLORD, based on the open-source LLVM/Clang Compiler Infrastructure. With OVERLORD developers can list the possible candidate functions for a call site, and obtain step-by-step reasoning about the candidate selection process. Additionally to its comprehension functionality the tool also provides profiling data on overload resolution times to help library authors streamline the set of available overloads for improving the compilation performance.

Botond also reports on his early prototype to improve overload resolution in the Clang compiler speeding up the compilation time by 2-5% in certain cases.

Bio:

Botond is a last semester MSc student at the Eötvös Loránd University, Faculty of Informatics in Budapest. He also works at Ericsson Hungary as a student intern. His main area of interest is the C++ programming language, and its supporting tool. The implementation of the overloading inspector is one of his main contribution, he presented at major C++ forums, like at the 2024 C++Now conference. Watch that video.

Links

Link to the event

Link to the meetup community

2025 June C++ meetup

Thu, 26 Jun 2025 19:00:00 +0200

Ctrl + Alt + C++: Rebooting Simplicity

Gábor Horváth - Senior Compiler Engineer @ Apple, London

Topic: C++ interoperability with memory-safe languages

Summary: As more teams adopt memory-safe languages alongside legacy C++, new challenges emerge. Gábor will show how Clang is evolving to make cross-language development safer, cleaner, and more ergonomic—right from inside Apple’s toolchain world.

Dénes Fintha – Software Engineer @ Shapr3D, Budapest

Topic: he Path Away from Complexity

Summary: C++ has transformed massively—from cryptic to clear(er). Dénes walks us through this evolution, highlighting key language features that made modern C++ more expressive and maintainable, without losing its power.

When, where

Thursday, June 26, 2025.

17:30: Doors Open
18:00 – 19:30: Talks + Q&A
Until 21:00: Networking

Location: Akadémia Offices- Shapr3D Office, Akadémia str. 6, 1054 Budapest

Link to meetup

Link

Upcoming C++ meetup

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 18:00:00 +0100

THINK PARALLEL: The Why & How of Modern C++

Bryce Adelstein Lelbach - Principal Architect, NVIDIA

Topic: Think Parallel

Summary: By default, we think sequentially. Parallelism and asynchrony are often seen as challenging tools to be used cautiously by experts. But in our increasingly parallel world—where everything from embedded devices to supercomputers relies on parallelism—we must change our mindset. In this example-driven session, Bryce will guide us through the foundational principles of parallel thinking. We will contrast different algorithms and data structures, exploring performance both sequentially and in parallel. Expect to walk away ready to think parallel.

Zoltán Porkoláb - Ericsson Hungary & ELTE Eötvös Loránd University

Topic: Ruminations on Parallel STL

Summary: C++17 introduced Parallel STL to simplify writing parallel code for developers already comfortable with the Standard Template Library. However, while Parallel STL can be powerful, it also presents risks: as Nikolai Josuttis has noted, issues of commutativity and associativity can lead to unexpected results, and the standard offers plenty of ways to “shoot yourself in the foot.” In this talk, Zoltán will share personal experiences, including the implementation of a generic filter-reduce algorithm for solving niche parallel tasks, and lessons learned along the way.

When, where

Monday, February 17, 2025.

17:30: Doors Open
18:00 – 19:30: Talks + Q&A
Until 21:00: Networking

Location: Puzl CowOrKing (Budapest, Lajos u. 126, 1036)

Link to meetup

Link

Research site debate of Richárd Szalay's PhD thesis

Mon, 27 Nov 2023 16:00:00 +0100

The research site debate of the PhD thesis of my PhD student, Richárd Szalay will start on Thursday, December 14, 16:00h in the Southern building at the Dean’s meeting room of the Faculty of Informatics.

When, where

Thursday, December 14, 2023. 16:00h, at the Dean’s meeting room, 2nd floor, 2-412 1117 Budapest, Pázmány Péter sétány 1/C

Research site debate of Anett Fekete's PhD thesis

Mon, 27 Nov 2023 16:00:00 +0100

The research site debate of the PhD thesis of my PhD student, Anett Fekete will start on Monday, November 27, 15:00h in the Southern building at the Dean’s meeting room of the Faculty of Informatics.

When, where

Monday, November 27, 2023. 15:00h, at the Dean’s meeting room, 2nd floor, 2-412 1117 Budapest, Pázmány Péter sétány 1/C.

PC member of SCAM'23: 2-3 October, 2023

Wed, 31 May 2023 20:00:00 +0200

I will be PC member for the 23rd IEEE International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation

When, where

October 2-3, 2023, Bogotá, Columbia

Link to the conference website

Important dates

Abstract Submission: Thursday, June 29th, 2023
Paper Submission: Thursday, July 6th, 2023
Author Notification: Thursday, August 10th, 2023
Camera Ready: Thursday, August 24th, 2023