C++ has many features but sometimes we want more. We will briefly tell the story of why and how we wrote a GCC plugin, used it in production, and later contributed the feature in-tree - now part of GCC 14. The goal of the talk is to motivate users to try GCC development, highlighting that there can be a smooth transition from plugins to in-tree patches.

There will be a written tutorial to go with the talk available to anyone to follow in their own time. The tutorial goes over writing your first custom attribute, static analysis, and instrumentation passes. All packed in the exercise of writing a toy Aspect Oriented C++ via plugins.