Professional C++, 5th Edition

INTRODUCTION

The development of C++ started in 1982 by Bjarne Stroustrup, a Danish computer scientist, as the successor of C with Classes. In 1985, the first edition of The C++ Programming Language book was released. The first standardized version of C++ was released in 1998, called C++98. In 2003, C++03 came out and contained a few small updates. After that, it was silent for a while, but traction slowly started building up, resulting in a major update of the language in 2011, called C++11. From then on, the C++ Standard Committee has been on a three-year cycle to release updated versions, giving us C++14, C++17, and now C++20. All in all, with the release of C++20 in 2020, C++ is almost 40 years old and still going strong. In most rankings of programming languages in 2020, C++ is in the top four. It is being used on an extremely wide range of hardware, going from small devices with embedded microprocessors all the way up to multirack supercomputers. Besides wide hardware support, C++ can be used to tackle almost any programming job, be it games on mobile platforms, performance-critical artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) software, real-time 3-D graphics engines, low-level hardware drivers, entire operating systems, and so on. The performance of C++ programs is hard to match with any other programming language, and as such, it is the de facto language for writing fast, powerful, and enterprise-class object-oriented programs. As popular as C++ has become, ...