Microsoft Reactor

The talks are set for Pure Virtual C++ 2026, our free, one-day virtual conference for the whole C++ community. We’re excited to reveal the featured session lineup and the speakers bringing it to you.

The conference is completely free and streamed online, so you can join from anywhere in the world.

Featured Sessions

C++ semantic awareness in the CLI: From Project Load to Code Change

Sinem Akinci — Senior Product Manager, Microsoft

What if you could open a large C++ project in your terminal and navigate symbols, trace call graphs, and fix bugs, with the same accuracy as your IDE's language services? In this session, we'll show how Microsoft C++ language server brings that experience to Copilot CLI. We'll walk through loading a real C++ project for the first time, automatically generating all the build context needed for full semantic understanding. From that point on, Copilot resolves C++ symbols, follows references across translation units, and produces edits that actually compile, all without ever opening an IDE.

About the speaker: Sinem Akinci graduated from the University of Michigan, where she studied Industrial Engineering and Computer Science. Since then, she has worked across a range of domains, including engineering and consulting, and is now a Senior Product Manager at Microsoft focused on C++ developer tooling and AI-assisted workflows across Visual Studio, VS Code, and the CLI.

From Completions to Agents: AI-Driven C++ in Visual Studio

Augustin Popa — Senior Product Manager, Microsoft

Visual Studio has evolved into a modern, AI-first C++ IDE that keeps pace with the rapidly changing development landscape. In this session, you will learn about the latest capabilities of GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio, from AI-assisted code completion and refactoring to in-box agentic workflows with zero setup required. You'll also leave with an understanding of how you can add your own, team-specific AI customizations so your environment is tailored to you.

About the speaker: Augustin Popa is a Senior Product Manager on the Microsoft C++ team, working on the Visual Studio IDE, Microsoft C++ (MSVC) Build Tools, and vcpkg, the cross-platform C/C++ package manager.

Cut Your Build Times Without Becoming a Build Expert

David Li — Senior Product Manager, Microsoft

Slow C++ builds are a common nuisance. This session shows how GitHub Copilot build performance for Windows helps you tackle that problem, with you steering the whole way. You will see the full agentic workflow: capture a build trace, surface the real hotspots like expensive headers and heavy template instantiations, apply fixes, and verify they worked with before and after numbers. You stay in control at each step, deciding which suggestions to keep. We will also look at how this helps your iterative builds. Copilot proposes a change, measures the impact, keeps what helps, and rolls back anything that regresses, so the results are ones you can trust and understand. You will leave able to move as fast as a dedicated build engineer, with Copilot handling the heavy lifting and you making the calls.

About the speaker: David Li is the Game Developer Product Manager at Visual Studio with 14 years of experience in the software industry. As a gamer himself, David is especially passionate about enhancing game developer productivity through improving tooling for Visual Studio. In his free time, he enjoys spending time with his baby and dog and conquering the world in Europa Universalis V.

C++/WinRT: Build faster and smaller with C++20 modules

Ryan Shepherd — Senior Software Engineer, Microsoft

Looking for ways to modernize your C++ code? Join us for this session where you can learn how the Windows team recently added support to C++/WinRT for C++20 modules. Windows Terminal used this to speed up their build by minutes (~15%) and reduce build-time disk usage by tens of gigabytes.

About the speaker: Ryan is an engineer on Windows working on developer fundamentals and experiences. He focuses primarily on WinRT, C++/WinRT, SDKs, the CRT, and other developer-facing functionality, like Git integration. Outside Microsoft, he entertains as a freelance trombonist, and along with his wife and two dogs he dabbles in music composition, photography, baking, and camping.

Mind The Gap: C++/Rust Interop
Victor Ciura — Principal Rustacean, Microsoft

Hybrid C++/Rust codebases are quickly becoming a thing. We need to learn to play nice together... for a looong time! Rust code everywhere is increasing at an accelerated rate, but so does C++ (and that's on top of gazillion lines already out there). Having seamless interop between the C++ and Rust components is essential for the success of this symbiosis. There are many challenges in this process, but people found various ways to make things "work" — from dealing with ABI compatibility and platform/toolchain guarantees, to going down to C and FFI, to various techniques and tools for generating glue-code between the two languages. Alas, general-purpose interoperability (not tied to a specific toolchain/IR) without loss of performance has yet to be achieved. Just "making things work" is not enough in the domain space of C++ and Rust; as such, many of the explored solutions so far by the community fail to deliver on all the needed requirements, swinging the wide range between performant and ergonomic. This presentation aims to highlight some of the interop challenges, the explored solutions out there, and tease out the avenues at the forefront of this pursuit.

About the speaker: Victor Ciura is the technical lead of the Rust program in DevDiv, building the compiler toolchain and SDK needed for the broader 🦀 oxidation efforts across Microsoft and open-source community. Spent the last 25 years doing systems programming in C++ on various teams, such as: Visual C++ (DevDiv), Advanced Installer, Clang Power Tools.