C++: The Documentary released today

C++ 2026-06-042026-06-04

2 Minutes C++: The Documentary premiered today on YouTube, and it was great to be on the live chat with Bjarne and many other key folks who participated in C++’s history. I’m honored to have been one of hundreds of people who have played a part in advancing Bjarne’s wonderful project over the years.

If you haven’t watched this yet, make it a weekend goal. What a great synopsis of a 40-year success story, from humble beginnings to global adoption to being currently (as of Q3 2025) the fastest-growing of the top four languages in the world… +90% users in the past 3.5 years.

People who appear in the documentary:

Bjarne Stroustrup: Bell Labs, Designer and original implementer of C++

Alexander Stepanov: Designer of the Standard Template Library

Anders Hejlsberg: Creator of C#, TypeScript, and Turbo Pascal

Andrei Alexandrescu: Principal Research Scientist, Nvidia & C++ Author

Andrew Koenig: Bell Labs, Founding member of the C++ Standards Committee, Researcher, C++ Author & Educator

Barbara Moo: Bell Labs, Manager C++ Development Team & C++ Author

Brian Kernighan: Bell Labs, Computer Scientist, Co-author of “The C Programming Language”

Chris Lattner: Creator of Mojo, LLVM, Clang & Swift

Danilo Piparo: Particle Physicist, CERN, ROOT Framework Project Lead

Eric Lubin: Software Developer – Lead, Hudson River Trading

Gabriel Dos Reis: Software Engineer and Architect, Microsoft; C++ tools builder; Mathematician

Herb Sutter: Technical Fellow, Citadel Securities; Chair, Standard C++ Foundation; Chair Emeritus, ISO C++ Committee

John Romero:

Video Game Developer, Co-Creator of Doom and Quake, Co-Founder id Software

Nina Ranns: Vice-Convener of the ISO C++ Committee

Chapters

00:00 Intro

01:50 Invention at AT&T Bell Labs

07:30 C with Classes

09:37 Early adoption of C with Classes

10:53 From C with Classes to C++ (and CFront)

12:32 Why is it called C++?

13:24 AT&T starts selling software / Another team tries to take over C++

16:08 Early development of C++ at AT&T Bell Labs

19:10 “It was a buggy product” / Release 2.0.0

21:55 C++ spreading beyond AT&T

24:50 Too many versions of C++

26:03 Need for standardization

29:38 The STL by Alexander Stepanov

37:19 The first standard: C++98

39:21 C++ at CERN in the 90s

40:34 C++ spreading to games and trading

43:00 C++ winter of the early 2000s

45:34 Programming language wars (C#)

49:25 There’s a need for an efficient programming language again

52:29 Modern C++ (C++11)

56:29 Is the standards committee making C++ too complicated?

1:00:45 C++ is everwhere

01:05:00 The future and challenges for C++

01:08:31 Bjarne’s impact

Published by Herb Sutter

Herb Sutter is an author and speaker, and a technical fellow at Citadel Securities. He serves as chair of the Standard C++ Foundation and its conference CppCon, and served as chair of the ISO C++ standards committee from 2002 to 2025.

View all posts by Herb Sutter Published 2026-06-042026-06-04

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