C++: The Documentary

Herb Sutter 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