Core C++ 2021 :: Bjarne Stroustrup :: Thriving in a crowded and changing world: C++ 2006-2020
Channel: CoreCppIL
Date: 2021-09-17

Keynote by Bjarne Stroustrup at Core C++ 2021 conference. The talk was given remotely in a live session.

By 2006, C++ had been in widespread industrial use for 20 years. It 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. 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 language changes to the ISO C++ standard for the 2011 and 2020 revisions.

Themes include efforts to preserve the essence of C++ through evolutionary changes, to simplify its use, to achieve complete type-and-resource safety, 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.

The ISO C++ standard evolves through a consensus process. We try (not always successfully) to mitigate the effects of design by committee, bureaucratic paralysis, and excessive enthusiasm for a variety of language fashions.

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Bjarne Stroustrup is the designer and original implementer of C++ as well as the author of The C++ Programming Language (4th Edition) and A Tour of C++ (2nd edition), Programming: Principles and Practice using C++ (2nd Edition), and many popular and academic publications. Dr. Stroustrup is a Technical Fellow and Managing Director in the technology division of Morgan Stanley in New York City as well as a visiting professor at Columbia University. He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, and an IEEE, ACM, and CHM fellow. He is the recipient of the 2018 NAE Charles Stark Draper Prize for Engineering and the 2017 IET Faraday Medal. He did much of his most important work in Bell Labs. His research interests include distributed systems, design, programming techniques, software development tools, and programming languages. To make C++ a stable and up-to-date base for real-world software development, he has been a leading figure with the ISO C++ standards effort for 30 years. He holds a master’s in Mathematics from Aarhus University, where he is an honorary professor in the Computer Science Department, and a PhD in Computer Science from Cambridge University, where he is an honorary fellow of Churchill College.

www.stroustrup.com