C++Now 2019

Composition is the essence of code architecture, and monoids are a powerful and
underappreciated compositional pattern that is lurking in code of all kinds.
Identifying and exploiting monoids is perhaps the best way to improve our code's
large-scale architecture, in the same way that recognizing algorithms and
replacing raw loops is a great way to improve small-scale architecture.

When we start looking for monoids, we find that they are everywhere, and it's
not just about std::accumulate with addition! In this talk I want to develop an
intuition for recognizing this ubiquitous design pattern. I will show some ways
to think about code capabilities at a higher level, and how thinking in terms of
monoids can help us with things like API design, incremental computation,
evolving system state and distributing work. Along the way we'll also look at
how C++ language and library features can support putting monoids to work in our
code.