Professional C++, 6th 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, C++20, and now C++23. All in all, with the release of C++23 in 2023, C++ is almost 40 years old and still going strong. In most rankings of programming languages in 2023, 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 multi-rack 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, components for self-driving cars, real-time 3-D graphics engines, low-level hardware drivers, entire operating systems, software stacks for networking equipment, web browsers, 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 ...