This is the story of C++, one of the world’s most widely-used and consequential programming languages. C++ divides opinion, resists replacement, and has outlasted almost everything built to supersede it.
C++ The Documentary traces the full arc, from its origins in the corridors of Bell Labs to the global community that shapes it today.
Featuring the people who built it, extended it, argued over it, and refused to let it die.
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; Emeritus Chair, 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
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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
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Thanks to Hudson River Trading for making this documentary possible ➡️➡️
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Thanks to Railway, our channel sponsor, for supporting our work ➡️
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Directed by: Ida Bechtle
Produced by: Emma Tracey
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Very few AAA video games used C++ last century
1:04:03 shaking his head no LOL
C with philosophy and dogma
I'm not even a programmer, yet I greatly appreciate what these individuals have accomplished, and the long term dedication they committed to succeed in their efforts
What a special privilege is was to hear from Brian Kernighan! If there was a Nobel prize for coding you and your Merry Band of early Unix programmers definitely deserve it! THANK YOU for saving us from having to code/think in so many other handicapped languages and operating environments of that era, and truly paved the path forward to modern computing.
Spending 40+years of programming, mainly in C and C++, and reading the books by all these great people, it is so cool to finally hear the background from the horses mouths!!!
When I interview new developers, one of my questions is, "name the benefits of object-oriented programming." The best answer is that it helps organize the code. One of C's chief weaknesses is that there is no feature to help keep the code organized, and the chief contribution of C++ is that it addresses this.
I don't like C++ , It didn't give me a job
C/C++ is very powerful language!!!
Dreadfully loud background 'music'.
I took a course in Computer science during Highschool and was using C++. This was back in the year 2000. It literally kicked my ass bc I wasn't building up to it since a small age but simply tossed into the deep end of the pool. Interesting times to be alive certainly.
that was such a great watch, but my wife is calling me for some stupid work, so I gotta go man, I will watch it later
C++ was my first language i learnt
Amazing to see it's history
I'm shocked the documentary never mentions the 2015 release of Bjarne and Herb's C++ Core Guidelines, found on github. This document helped me immensely. It's a Bible.
58:28 Lazo's rant is quoted here!~ nice 😂
Bjarne makes me proud of my hometown of Aarhus in Denmark and all the bright minds who came and went through those university doors.
Python is a curious case. I didn't know it compiles into C++ and then into AL. Is that even true because if that's the case then I don't see why Eve Online being written in Python should be such a hinderance or so I have read over a decade ago at this point. Perhaps it is not. My ignorance knows no boundaries.
People regularly don't value something remotely close to its intrinsic value until someone else wants to buy it.
A story as old as time itself.
We’re at the cusp where a senior experienced project analyst will direct AI to create any software in any language. The problem is a lack of young people getting experience or a full education to be able to have analytical project experience.
for Gods sake are yous actually going to get too the point and explainwhat exactly it is – or play sheep dinky music all day long! 10 minutes in……. 24 minutes later. ….I hear more idolation C++ but no getting into what it is and what the difference was.
"I made up the term "object-oriented," and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind." Alan Kay
I grew up with it!… Effectively 😁
Master C++ and, almost, every other computer language is relatively simple to learn.
Its hell cumbersome, but its fast and speed is needed for speed critical things like OS and Game
OMG! Bjarne owes the world an apology. C++ was the most obnoxious bloated disparate bag of bolts to, up to then, be foisted onto the world.
I remember when my group made the choice to stick with C when because the C++ library tax of 4MB of storage alone was just war-crime level of idiocy. This is why embedded systems are still ruled by proper C or a C++ so neutered it's hard to argue if it's really C++ anymore.