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June 14, 2020 02:34 pm

Bjarne Stroustrup Releases 168-Page Paper on How C Thrived

Bjarne Stroustrup, the 69-year-old Danish creator of C++, just released a 168-page paper (published under a Creative Commons Attributions-NoDerivatives license) in the Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, detailing the growth of C++ from its 21st birthday in 2006 up through the year 2020. It begins by noting that by 2006, C++ "contained parts that had survived unchanged since introduced into C in the early 1970s as well as features that were novel in the early 2000s..."Originally, I designed C++ to answer to the question "How do you directly manipulate hardware and also support efficient high-level abstraction?" Over the years, C++ has grown from a relatively simple solution based on a combination of facilities from the C and Simula languages aimed at systems programming on 1980s computers to a far more complex and effective tool for an extraordinary range of applications... [T]his is also the story of the people involved in the evolution of C++, the way they perceived the challenges, interpreted the constraints on solutions, organized their work, and resolved their inevitable differences. From the abstract:From 2006 to 2020, the C++ developer community grew from about 3 million to about 4.5 million. It was a period where new programming models emerged, hardware architectures evolved, new application domains gained massive importance, and quite a few well-financed and professionally marketed languages fought for dominance. How did C++ -- an older language without serious commercial backing -- manage to thrive in the face of all that? This paper focuses on the major changes to the ISO C++ standard for the 2011, 2014, 2017, and 2020 revisions... Themes include efforts to preserve the essence of C++ through evolutionary changes, to simplify its use, to improve support for generic programming, to better support compile-time programming, to extend support for concurrency and parallel programming, and to maintain stable support for decades' old code... Specific language-technical topics include the memory model, concurrency and parallelism, compile-time computation, move-semantics, exceptions, lambda expressions, and modules. "I hope other languages learn from C++'s successes," the paper concludes. "It would be sad if the lessons learned fromC++'s evolution were limited to the C++ community."

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