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