CppCon 2021 is half over already. Tonight I emceed the first game of the third annual CppCon “C++ Pub Quiz.” Herb Sutter offered opening remarks, and then joined one of our seven teams for a few rounds of play. What is C++ Pub Quiz, you ask? It’s a straightforward trivia night — five rounds, ten questions per round, write down your team’s answers on a sheet of paper and turn it in at the end of the round. High score after five rounds wins the game.

Last year, when CppCon was entirely online, the Pub Quiz was online too. This year, I returned to the in-person-only format. Sorry, online-conference attendees! Maybe we’ll see you here next year.

Seven teams participated in this year’s Pub Quiz. The winning team of the night was Team BYOB, with a score of 33 points, just edging out Team Hufflepuff at 32. Third place went to Rotate! That’s A with 30 points. Thanks also to Symbol Not Found; Unit Tested; the Reference ₩rappers a.k.a. UB Unicorns; and Flying Blind. It seemed like a good time was had by all. I certainly had a good time quizmastering!

A sample round of C++ Pub Quiz looks something like this:

1. For one point each, name the two authors of the 2001 book Accelerated C++.

2. In what standard library header are you guaranteed to find the declaration of std::terminate?

3. Name the creator of the sendmail program, who also lent his name to a style of indentation for curly-brace languages that puts each brace on a line by itself.

4. What command-line option would I pass to enable Clang’s “UBSan” sanitizer?

5. Name the C++ build system developed by Jussi Pakkanen, which shares a name with the class of hadrons composed of an even number of quarks.

6. What happens in the destructor of a joinable boost::thread?

7. In 1995, Todd Veldhuizen wrote an article in C++ Report describing a technique for evaluating vector and matrix expressions in a single pass without temporaries. Name that technique, which was also the title of his article.

8. In the C++20 acronyms “GMF” and “PMF,” the “M” stands for “module,” and the “F” stands for what eight-letter word meaning a syntactic subdivision?

9. Name the charitable organization headed by Vinnie Falco, René Rivera, and Jon Kalb, whose stated mission is to “empower the C++ community” and “promote the general welfare of the C++ programming language,” and which administrates cpplang.slack.com.

10. If T is an alias for int&, what type is const T&?

Special mentions go to:

• Flying Blind, the only team to score zero points on the multiple-choice round. If you guessed randomly, you’d have a 1-in-182 chance of getting every single question wrong — yet they managed it!

• Team Hufflepuff, the only team to recognize “Motorcar champagne, legit toxic, sixpence” as an anagram of the standard library identifier atomic_compare_exchange_strong_explicit.

If you missed the first game, don’t fret: It turns out I still have a whole second set of questions, so you will probably have another chance Thursday night after the lightning talks. We have not actually Schedded this as of this writing, but, assuming the room is unlocked and we get a quorum of players, it’ll be in the same bat place, later bat time — namely, in Summit 1 whenever the lightning talks have finished up.

As usual, if you’d like a copy of this year’s question set for use with your local user group, send me an email with one round — 10 pub quiz questions — of your own making, and I’ll send you the complete ten-round question set that I used at CppCon 2021.