UTU Tech Webinar with computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup – Thriving in a crowded and changing world: C++ 2006-2020

28.04.2021

The Faculty of Technology at the University of Turku organises the first UTU Tech Webinar with computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup, the designer and original implementer of the C++ programming language. The webinar will cover the design and evolution of C++ during 2006-2020. The audience has the opportunity to ask questions during the Q&A session. The event is open for all and no registration is required. Welcome!

Bjarne Stroustrup: Thriving in a crowded and changing world: C++ 2006-2020

By 2006, C++ had been in widespread industrial use for 20 years. It contained parts that had survived unchanged since introduced into C in the early 1970s as well as features that were novel in the early 2000s. From 2006 to 2020, the C++ developer community grew from about 3 million to about 4.5 million. It was a period where new programming models emerged, hardware architectures evolved, new application domains gained massive importance, and quite a few well-financed and professionally-marketed languages fought for dominance. How did C++ – an older language without serious commercial backing – manage to thrive in the face of all that? This talk focuses on the major language changes to the ISO C++ standard for the 2011 and 2020 revisions.

Themes include efforts to preserve the essence of C++ through evolutionary changes, to simplify its use, to achieve complete type-and-resource safety, to improve support for generic programming, to better support compile-time programming, to extend support for concurrency and parallel programming, and to maintain stable support for decades’ old code.

The ISO C++ standard evolves through a consensus process. We try (not always successfully) to mitigate the effects of design by committee, bureaucratic paralysis, and excessive enthusiasm for a variety of language fashions.

Bjarne Stroustrup is the designer and original implementer of C++. Dr. Stroustrup is a Technical Fellow and a Managing Director in the technology division of Morgan Stanley in New York City and a Visiting Professor in Computer Science at Columbia University. His research interests include distributed systems, design, programming techniques, software development tools, and programming languages.

Created 28.04.2021 | Updated 05.05.2021