template metaprogramming

Steven G. Johnson, MIT professor and FFTW co-author, gives a JuliaCon 2019 keynote on metaprogramming and staged programming in Julia, showing how it enables high-performance numerical code and when not to use macros.

Hana Dusikova's CppCon 2018 talk presenting a C++ library that builds regular expressions from compile-time strings, using a C++20 feature. It avoids runtime parsing cost and covers implementation details, problems she hit, and benchmarks.

Christian Schafmeister's Google Tech Talk on designing spiroligomer molecules and building Clasp, a Common Lisp on LLVM that interoperates with C++, to program molecular design. It covers the chemistry, automatic differentiation for force fields, and how the compiler is built.

Jonathan Blow's LambdaConf 2025 keynote demonstrates the Jai programming language and explains its design. It includes demos of metaprogramming and tools that visualize programs.

Tom Dale explains the internals of the Glimmer VM, Ember's rendering engine, which compiles templates to opcodes. The talk includes a performance benchmark demo.

Andrei Alexandrescu's CppCon 2015 talk argues that std::allocator is badly designed. He proposes building high-performance allocators from small composable, templated pieces.

A 2008 Google Tech Talk in which Slava Pestov introduces Factor, a concatenative language influenced by Forth, Lisp and Smalltalk. It covers the interactive environment, metaprogramming, and the language's modern high-level features and libraries.

Rob Pike shows how the Go text/template lexer is built, using state functions, goroutines and channels. The talk was given at a Google Technology User Group in Sydney in 2011.

Pete Hunt of Facebook and Instagram introduces React at JSConf EU 2013 and explains its design principles. He argues that separating templates from logic only separates technologies, not concerns, and makes the case for components.

David Guillot describes how his team replaced a two-year-old React UI of their SaaS product with Django templates and htmx in a couple of months. The talk gives concrete indicators on code size, performance and team impact.

Timothy Cain's 2012 GDC postmortem of the original Fallout, covering how he helped build the game and set the template for open-world RPGs. He talks through production, design and programming decisions.