C++ Turns 30 ? Looking Forward to the Future
Source: Rud Merriam
[Bjarne Stroustrup] introduced C++ to the world on Monday 14th October 1985 at the ACM annual conference on “The Range of Computing”. On its 30th anniversary [Bjarne] reviewed the history, his experience, and his thoughts on the future of the language in an interview. Also on that day the first edition of his book, “The C++ Programming Language” was released. It’s now available in a 4th edition. The title differed only in the “++” from the classic C book by [Kernighan] and [Ritchie] that graced the desktops of a multitude of C programmers.
The first versic++ bjarneons of C++ were compiled with CFront, a compiler that generated C code which was then compiled as normal. Around the 1990s, it’s unclear when, numerous native compilers became available, notably for PCs, which lead to explosive growth from 400,000 users to an estimated 4.4 million today.
One of the frustrations [Stroustrup] expresses is how C++ is viewed by developers,
… a problem that has plagued C++ forever: Poor teaching and poor understanding of C++ even among its practitioners. There has always been a tendency to describe C++ as some odd variant of something else.
Soon the standards committee is meeting to discuss C++17 in Hawaii. Fair winds and bright skies look to be in the future of C++.
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