C++ History

Development of C++ programming language started back in 1979 when Bjarne Stroustrup working for his Ph.D. thesis; he had the opportunity to work with a programming language called Simula. Simula is a programming language primarily designed for simulations. Simula was first language to support object-oriented programming paradigm. While working with Simula Bjarne Stroustrup found that this object-oriented programming paradigm can be very helpful in software development.

Soon thereafter, he started to work on a project called “C with Classes”, which was basically aimed to create a superset of C Programming Language with implementation of object-oriented programming features without sacrificing speed or low-level functionality. The new language he is been working implemented some add-on features such as classes, basic inheritance, in-lining, default function arguments, and strong type checking in addition to all the features of the C language.

The first compiler for C with Classes was named as Cfront, which was basically derived from a C compiler called CPre. Cfront was a program designed to translate C with Classes code to ordinary C. Later in 1993, Cfront was discontinued as it became difficult to integrate new features into it.

1983:- In 1983, “C with Classes” was renamed to “C++“, adding new features that included virtual functions, function name and operator overloading, references, constants, type-safe free-store memory allocation (new/delete), improved type checking, and BCPL style single-line comments with two forward slashes (//). Furthermore, it included the development of a standalone compiler for C++

1985:- The first commercial edition of C++ Programming Language was released. This was not yet a standardized version of language.

1989:- The official standard version 2.0 was released.

1990:- Borland’s Turbo C++ was released as a commercial product, this added a many additional libraries that impacted C++’s development considerably.

1998:- The standard committee of C++ released the first international standard for language ISO C++ 98.

2003:- The revised version of C++98 with lots of fixes was dubbed as C++03.

2011:- The C++11 standard was released with new features, extending the standard library further, and providing more facilities to C++ programmers.

2014 :- The revised version of C++11 with bug fixes and some improvements was released as C++14.

2017 :- C++17 is the current iteration of C++ ,released in 2017 with many new features.

Who developed C++?

The C++ Programming Language was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup, he developed C++ at AT&T Bell Labs, he headed the development of language till 2002.

Bjarne Stroustrup (The Creator of C++)