History of C++

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History of C++
 

Early C++

  • 1979: C with Classes first implemented
  1. New features: classes, member functions, derived classes, separate compilation, public and private access control, friends, type checking of function arguments, default arguments, inline functions, overloaded assignment operator, constructors, destructors, f() same as f(void), call-function and return-function (synchronization features, not in C++)
  2. Libraries: the concurrent task library (not in C++)
  • 1982: C with Classes reference manual published
  • 1984: C84 implemented, reference manual published
  • 1985: Cfront 1.0
  1. New features: virtual functions, function and operator overloading, references, new and delete operators, the keyword const, scope resolution operator
  2. Library additions: complex number, string (AT&T version), I/O stream
  • 1985: The C++ Programming Language, 1st edition
  • 1986: The "whatis?" paper documenting the remaining design goals, including multiple inheritance, exception handling, and templates.
  • 1987: C++ support in GCC 1.15.3
  • 1989: Cfront 2.0
  1. New features: multiple inheritance, pointers to members, protected access, type-safe linkage, abstract classes, static and const-qualified member functions, class-specific new and delete
  2. Library additions: I/O manipulators
  • 1990: The Annotated C++ Reference Manual

This book described the language as designed, including some features that were not yet implemented. It served as the de-facto standard until the ISO.

  1. New features: namespaces, exception handling, nested classes, templates
  • 1991: Cfront 3.0
  • 1991: The C++ Programming Language, 2nd edition

Standard C++

  • 1990: ANSI C++ Committee founded
  • 1991: ISO C++ Committee founded
  • 1992: STL implemented in C++

C++98/03 period

  • 1998: C++98 (ISO/IEC 14882:1998)
  1. New features: RTTI (dynamic_cast, typeid), covariant return types, cast operators, mutable, bool, declarations in conditions, template instantiations, member templates, export
  2. Library additions: locales, bitset, valarray, auto_ptr, templatized string, I/O streams, and complex numbers.
  3. Based on STL: containers, algorithms, iterators, function objects
  • 1998: The C++ Programming Language, 3rd edition
  • 1999: Boost founded by the committee members to produce new high-quality candidate libraries for the standard.
  • 2003: C++03 (ISO/IEC 14882:2003)

This was a minor revision, intended to be little more than a technical corrigendum. This revision introduces the definition of value initialization.

Defect Reports fixed in C++03 (92 core, 125 library)

This TR discussed the costs of various C++ abstractions, provided implementation guidance, discussed use of C++ in embedded systems and introduced <hardware> interface to C's ISO/IEC TR 18037:2008 <iohw.h>.

This TR is a C++ library extension, which adds the following to the C++ standard library:

  1. From Boost: reference_wrapper, Smart pointers, Member function, result_of, bind, function, Type Traits, Random, Mathematical Special Functions, tuple, array, Unordered Containers (including hash), and Regular Expressions.
  2. From C99: mathematical functions from <math.h> that were new in C99, blank character class, Floating-point environment, hexfloat I/O Manipulator, fixed-size integral types, the long long type, va_copy, the snprintf() and vfscanf() families of functions, and the C99 conversion specifies for printf() and scanf() families of functions.

All of TR1 except for the special functions was included in C++11, with minor changes.

This international standard is a C++ standard library extension, which adds the special functions that were part of TR1, but were not included in C++11: elliptic integrals, exponential integral, Laguerre polynomials, Legendre polynomials, Hermite polynomials, Bessel functions, Neumann functions, beta function, and Riemann zeta function. This standard was merged into C++17.

C++11 period

Main Article: C++11

A large number of changes were introduced to both standardize existing practices and improve the abstractions available to the C++ programmers

This TR implements the decimal floating-point types from IEEE 754-2008 Standard for Floating-Point Arithmetic: std::decimal::decimal32, std::decimal::decimal64, and std::decimal::decimal128.

C++14 period

Main Article: C++14

Minor revision of the C++ standard

This TS is an experimental C++ library extension that specifies a filesystem library based on boost.filesystem V3 (with some modifications and extensions). This TS was merged into C++17.

This TS standardizes parallel and vector-parallel API for all standard library algorithms, as well as adds new algorithms such as reduce, transform_reduce, or exclusive_scan. This TS was merged into C++17.

  • 2015: Extensions for Transactional Memory TS (ISO/IEC TS 19841:2015) (ISO Store) ([2015 draft)

This TS extends the C++ core language with synchronized and atomic blocks, as well as transaction-safe functions, which implement transactional memory semantics.

  • 2015: Extensions for Library Fundamentals TS (ISO/IEC TS 19568:2015) (ISO Store) (2015 draft)

This TS adds several new components to the C++ standard library: optional, any, string_view, sample, search, apply, polymorphic allocators, and variable templates for type traits. This TS was merged into C++17.

This TS extends the C++ core language with concepts (named type requirements) and constraints (limits on the types allowed in template, function, and variable declarations), which aids metaprogramming and simplifies template instantiation diagnostics, see concepts. This TS was merged into C++20, with some omissions.

This TS extends the C++ library to include several extensions to std::future, latches and barriers, and atomic smart pointers.

C++17 period

Main Article: C++17

The major revision of the C++ standard after C++11

This TS extends the C++ library to include ranges, a new, more powerful, abstraction to replace iterator pairs, along with range views, sentinel ranges, projections for on-the-fly transformations, new iterator adaptors and algorithms. This extension finally makes it possible to sort a vector with sort(v);

This TS extends the C++ core language and the standard library to include stackless coroutines (resumable functions). This adds the keywords co_await, co_yield, and co_return.

This TS extends the C++ library to include TCP/IP networking based on boost.asio.

This TS extends the C++ core language to include modules. This adds the special identifiers module, import, and reintroduces the keyword export with a new meaning.

  • 2018: Extensions for Parallelism version 2 TS (ISO/IEC TS 19570:2018) (ISO Store) (2018 draft)

This TS extends the C++ library to include two new execution policies (unseq and vec), additional parallel algorithms such as reduction_plus or for_loop_strided, task blocks for forking and joining parallel tasks, SIMD types and operations on those types.

C++20 period

Main Article: C++20

The major revision of the C++ standard after C++17

This TS extends C++ with the facilities to inspect program entities such as variables, enumerations, classes and their members, lambdas and their captures, etc.

Future development

Main Article: C++23

The next major revision of the C++ standard

See also

C documentation for History of C

External links

  A History of C++: 1979-1991
  Evolving a language in and for the real world: C++ 1991-2006
  Thriving in a crowded and changing world: C++ 2006-2020
  Standard C++ foundation
  C++ on Wikipedia
  C++ Standards Committee
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