C++ Modules in ROOT and Beyond

Abstract

C++ Modules, one of the new features of C++20, aim to fix the long-standing build scalability problems in the language. They provide an IOefficient, on-disk representation capable to reduce build times and peak memory usage. ROOT already employs the C++ modules technology in its dictionary system to improve performance and reduce the memory footprint. ROOT with C++ Modules was released as a technology preview in fall 2018, after intensive development during the previous few years. The current state is ready for production, however, there is still room for performance optimizations. In this talk, we show the road map for making this technology enabled by default in ROOT. We demonstrate a global module indexing optimization which allows reducing the memory footprint dramatically for many workflows. We will report user feedback on the migration to ROOT with C++ Modules.