C++: The Documentary

C++: The documentary premiered today on YouTube. It was great to have a live chat with Bjarne and many other key people involved in the history of C++. I am honored to be one of the hundreds of people who have helped develop Bjarne's amazing project over the years.

If you haven’t watched it yet, make it your weekend goal. It's a great overview of our 40-year success story, from small beginnings to global adoption, to now (as of Q3 2025) the fastest-growing language among the top four languages ​​in the world, with over 90% adoption over the past three and a half years.

People featured in the documentary:

- Bjarne Stroustrup: Bell Labs, designer and original C++ implementer

- Alexander Stepanov: Standard Template Library Designer

- Anders Hejlsberg: Creator of C#, TypeScript, and Turbo Pascal

- Andrei Alexandrescu: Senior Research Scientist and C++ Writer at Nvidia

- Andrew Koenig: Bell Labs, C++ Standards Committee founding member, researcher, C++ author, and educator

- Barbara Moo: Bell Labs, C++ Development Team Manager and C++ Author

- Brian Kernighan: Bell Labs, computer scientist, co-author of “The C Programming Language”

- Chris Lattner: Founder of Mojo, LLVM, Clang & Swift

- Danilo Piparo: particle physicist, CERN, ROOT framework project lead

- Eric Lubin: Software Developer – Hudson River Trading Lead

- Gabriel Dos Reis: Software Engineer and Architect, Microsoft; C++ Tool Builder; mathematician

- Herb Sutter: Technology Researcher, Citadel Securities; Chairman, Standard C++ Foundation; ISO C++ Committee Honorary Chairman

- John Romero: video game developer, co-creator of Doom and Quake, co-founder of id Software

- Nina Ranns: Vice Chair of the ISO C++ Committee

chapter

- 00:00 Introduction

- 01:50 Inventions at AT&T Bell Labs

- 07:30 C class

- 09:37 Early adoption of C with classes

- 10:53 From C to C++ (and CFront) with classes

- 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 product with a lot of bugs” / 2.0.0 released

- 21:55 C++ spreads beyond AT&T

- 24:50 There are too many C++ versions.

- 26:03 Standardization is needed

- 29:38 STL by Alexander Stepanov

- 37:19 First standard: C++98

- 39:21 C++ at CERN in the 90s

- 40:34 C++ spreads to games and trading

- Early 2000s C++ Winter 43:00

- 45:34 Programming Language Wars (C#)

- 49:25 We need efficient programming languages again

- 52:29 Latest C++ (C++11)

- 56:29 Are standards committees making C++ too complicated?

- 1:00:45 C++ is everywhere.

- 01:05:00 The future and challenges of C++

- 01:08:31 Villan’s influence