C++: The Documentary Released Today

Source: Hacker News

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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