Rob and Jason are joined by Akim Demaille to discuss VCSN, a platform for automata and rational expressions, and some of the interesting problems he faced while working on the library. Akim has been participating in free software for about 20 years, starting with a2ps, an anything to PostScript tool written in C. In order to ensure its portability, he became a major contributor to GNU Autoconf, GNU Automake and GNU Bison. Akim has been teaching and researching at EPITA, a French CS Graduate School, for eighteen years. He has taught formal languages, logics, OO design, C++ and compiler constructions, which includes the Tiger compiler, an educational project where students implement a compiler in C++. This project, whose assignment is regularly updated, keeps track of the C++ eveolutions, and this year's version uses C++17 features. Akim's recent research interests are focused on the Vcsn platform, dedicated to automata and rational expressions. He's recently been recruited by former students of his to be part of the Infinit team at Docker. News Announcing Meeting C++ 2017 C++Now 2017 Keynote: Ali Çehreli - Competitive Advantage with D Reduce C++ Build Times by Reducing Header Dependencies Capturing *this in C++11, 14 and 17 Akim Demaille Akim Demaille's GitHub Links Vcsn home page Vcsn Online Sandbox The Tiger Project Johnny Five Technical report about runtime instantiation in C++ Sponsors Incredibuild JetBrains