Trip Report - ACCU on Sea 2026

Three years after my first live conference at C++ on Sea I returned to Folkestone for the new ACCU on Sea conference, which ran between the 16th and 20th of July.

I am slightly late to posting this owing to a heat dome, which is wreaking havoc all over Europe right now. Luckily, the weather was lovely for the duration of the conference, save for a few showers.

As the name implies, the two biggest UK systems programming conferences (C++ on Sea and ACCU) have merged. In fact, a common joke this year was “This is my first time at the conference - and it’s yours too!”.

The trip came together late this year, I only found out that I would be going to the conference about 4 weeks before the event started. Folkestone is not hugely dissimilar to where I grew up and I have found it a nostalgic and pleasant location for a conference on both occasions, even if the town itself is slightly light on infrastructure. Speaking of which, atypically, the British rail network did not fail me on either trip to or from the conference. Interestingly though, it was a mere 30 minutes into the early registration session before multiple German attendees lamented the state of the Deutsche Bahn. Conferences are great for such perspective adjustments, even if all one learns is that most people complain about the same things!

Anyway, here is a very quick rundown of the notable talks.

Talks

Apart from the keynotes, there were a whopping 5 tracks to choose from for each session. This often made it hard to choose which session to attend and there were occasions where talks were scheduled in rooms that I would consider much smaller than the relative stature of the speaker (Matt Godbolt’s talk was a prime example with many people standing).

The talks will all be available on YouTube at some point in future, so I’ll only give a brief overview of the notable ones that I attended. At the time of writing though, it seems that there is not a specific ACCU-on-Sea YouTube channel, so who knows where they’ll end up.

AI

No avoiding the societal topic du jour - there were a couple of AI-themed talks from Andrei Alexandrescu (“The Next 20 Weeks of Systems Engineering”) and Prof. Yvonne Rogers (“Out of Our Minds: What is AI Doing To Us and For Us?”). The former focussed on predictions about software engineering in the age of LLMs. It was fine enough (relative to the general state of AI discourse) and made some believable predictions. Prof. Rogers’ talk was much more human factors focussed and it seemed that the speaker’s position was that AI is the proverbial genie out of the bottle and we should try to make the best we can of that. There was some great audience participation at the end, although it seemed the room was perhaps not so optimistic about the integration of AI within our wider society.

🦀❤️

Rust played a larger part in the conference that I had initially expected. The Rust talks that I attended were “The Future of C++ Is Memory Safe” by Jon Bauman and “Incrementally securing your C++” using Rust by Taylor Cramer, but there were a couple of other sessions too. Both talks were very good in my opinion - it was encouraging to see the intersection of C++ and Rust being actively worked on to what I perceive to be mutual benefit. Some good news is that it seems like more Rust folk are getting involved with WG21, which will hopefully yield some valuable cross-pollination. Particularly of note though, was this snippet in the abstract of “Incrementally securing your C++”:

…with the intention of building 100% of new software in memory-safe languages by 2030.

It seems like the industry might be starting to get serious on memory safety with actions rather than just words.

Microarchitecture

Two of the best technical talks were in the area of microarchitecture. It seems like a lot of reverse engineering has been happening over the past decade or so, and courtesy of Matt Godbolt and Ofek Shillon, we were treated to some in-depth analysis of how Skylake-era CPUs implement functionality such as out of order execution, speculative execution, uop fusing etc. Both talks (“Microarchitecture: What Lies Beneath” and “Processor Design and Memory Models”) are at the top of my re-watch list where the pause button and a notepad will certainly come in handy. It would also be worth highlighting the uiCA tool used by Matt Godbolt, which simulates uops based on openly available uop info and assuming all memory accesses result in cache hits.

“It’s funny because it’s true”

On top of the expected pearls of wisdom, I found a couple of the talks especially humorous.

Potentially my favourite talk of the conference in terms of entertainment value was “Postmodern Programming” by Tony Van Eerd. The majority of the talk was given in Dr Seuss style rhyme, with a serious helping of both dry wit and self-referential humour. Interwoven with the more comical aspects of the talk were genuine lessons about naming, abstractions, and formatting. It even finished in true postmodernist style with tongue-in-cheek “Comments on an Explanation of an Analysis of Postmodern Programming”.

“The Performance Mindset” by Mathieu Ropert was another strong contender. This was a more philosophical talk about how performance can be overlooked in the day-to-day operation of a software team and the resulting performance regressions that can creep up on you as a result. It was my first talk by Mathieu, and he has a wicked sense of humour (look out for his lightning talk too, which was also quite funny). The highlight of this talk was advice on how to socially engineer your management or “cook the books” in JIRA to give yourself time for more “vibes based” activities, which many people in the room seemed to find common cause with!

Other Great Talks

I loved Hana Dusíková’s 2024 Meeting C++ Talk “My favorite data structures” so it was a no-brainer to attend “Where does constexpr start and where it ends”. At the beginning of this talk, Hana mentioned that it would be very similar to the Meeting C++ one, which meant we were treated to another in-depth explanation of constexpr evaluation semantics through the lens of STL data structures. Much like I enjoyed the first iteration, I would definitely recommend this one, especially because it has more up-to-date information for the language’s constexpr semantics.

Readers may know the speaker Laurie Kirk from her popular computer science YouTube channel LaurieWired, who delivered an interesting talk entitled “CallMeMaybe: Building Modern Runtime Reflection via C++26”. It contained a gentle introduction to the basics of C++26 static reflection and implementation notes on how it was leveraged to build terse, yet expressive runtime polymorphism.

Food For Thought

With breakfast provided at the hotel and lunch provided by the conference, there was little need to explore the local eateries this year.

On the night before the conference proper, I encountered vegan fish and chips made with banana blossom. I hadn’t heard of banana blossom used as a vegan fish substitute but even a cursory Google search yields lots of results.

The daily conference lunch was what we natives affectionately refer to as “British Tapas” (a buffet containing lots of beige carbs). Whilst it was all good with me, I do wonder what the international attendees made of it (although I totally forgot to ask anyone this…). I have had non-British colleagues tell me that “British people eat like they’re still at war”, so perhaps we can extrapolate from that.

I didn’t have a ticket for the speaker’s dinner this year but enjoyed some (blossom-less) fish and chips by the harbour with other attendees for the final night of the stay.

Sponsors were dishing out free food too! We had free pizza courtesy of Mosaic and free kebabs from Think Cell.

Conclusion

Overall, another solid iteration of the conference. The community were welcoming and I left with some fresh perspective and drive in these arguably trying times for the software industry.

Hats off to the organisers of the newly merged event! Here’s hoping I’ll be back again in future.