C++ Exceptions are Code Compression
Khalil Estell
09:00-10:30, Thursday, 3rd April 2025
For years, developers have overlooked a powerful tool for reducing binary size: exceptions. Join me on a deep dive into the world of exceptions and discover how they can be harnessed to create more space efficient software. By the end of this talk, you’ll have a thorough understanding of how exceptions are handled in C++, how this extends, what their space costs are, and how exceptions compare to functional errors as values.
Khalil Estell
I am an African American who graduated with a degree in Computer Engineering from San Jose State University (SJSU) in 2017. Since March 2018, I have been working at Google, where I was a key firmware developer for the Google Pixel Watch, Google Pixel Buds Pro, and a few other projects that were ultimately not released. In addition to my work at Google, I served as a volunteer instructor at SJSU from 2017 to 2020 and have sponsored and mentored the SJSU Robotics team since 2017.
My passion lies in embedded systems, specifically in making embedded software more portable and user-friendly in C++. I believe that C++ is the ideal language for building the embedded applications I envision, offering the control and capability necessary to handle virtually all tasks in this domain. Currently, my focus is on demonstrating that exceptions are the most effective mechanism for error handling in C++ across all applications, particularly in embedded systems.