History of C++ language

The C++ programming language has a history going back to 1979, when Bjarne Stroustrup was doing work for his Ph.D. thesis. He began work on "C with Classes", which as the name implies was meant to be a superset of the C language. His goal was to add object-oriented programming into the C language, which was and still is a language well-respected for its portability without sacrificing speed or low-level functionality.

His language included classes, basic inheritance, inlining, default function arguments, and strong type checking in addition to all the features of the C language. The first C with Classes compiler was called Cfront, which was derived from a C compiler called CPre. It was a program designed to translate C with Classes code to ordinary C.

In 1983, the name of the language was changed from C with Classes to C++. The ++ operator in the C language is an operator for incrementing a variable, which gives some insight into how Stroustrup regarded the language. Many new features were added around this time, the most notable of which are virtual functions, function overloading, references with the & symbol, the const keyword, and single-line comments using two forward slashes.

In 1985, C++ was implemented as a commercial product. The language was not officially standardized yet. The language was updated again in 1989 to include protected and static members, as well as an inheritance from several classes.

In 1990, Turbo C++ was released as a commercial product. Turbo C++ added a lot of additional libraries which have had a considerable impact on C++'s development.

In 1998, the C++ standards committee published the first international standard for C++ ISO/IEC 14882:1998, which is informally known as C++98. The Standard Template Library, which began its conceptual development in 1979, was also included. In 2003, the committee responded to multiple problems that were reported with their 1998 standard and revised it accordingly. The changed language was named C++03.

In mid-2011, the new C++ standard (C++11) was finished. The new features included Regex support, a randomization library, a new C++ time library, atomics support, a standard threading library, a new for loop syntax providing functionality similar to for each loops in certain other languages, the auto keyword, new container classes, better support for unions and array-initialization lists and variadic templates.