History of C++
Early C++
- 1979: C with Classes first implemented
- 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++)
- 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
- New features: virtual functions, function and operator overloading, references, new and delete operators, the keyword const, scope resolution operator
- Library additions: complex, string, iostream
- 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
- New features: multiple inheritance, pointers to members, protected access, type-safe linkage, abstract classes, static and const member functions, class-specific new and delete
- 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.
- 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++
- 1998 C++98 (ISO/IEC 14882:1998)
- New features: RTTI (dynamic_cast, typeid), covariant return types, cast operators, mutable, bool, declarations in conditions, template instantiations, member templates, export
- Library additions: locales, bitset, valarray, auto_ptr, templatized string, iostream, and complex.
- 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.
- 2006 Performance TR (ISO/IEC TR 18015:2006) (ISO Store) (2006 draft)
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>
.
- 2007 Library extension TR1 (ISO/IEC TR 19768:2007) (ISO store) (2005 draft).
This TR is a C++ library extension, which adds the following to the C++ standard library:
- 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.
- 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.
- 2010 Mathematical special functions (ISO/IEC 29124:2010) (ISO Store) (2010 draft)
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.
- 2011 C++11 (ISO/IEC 14882:2011) (ISO Store) (Post-publication draft).
A large number of changes were introduced to both standardize existing practices and improve the abstractions available to the C++ programmers
- 2011 Decimal floating-point TR (ISO/IEC TR 24733:2011) (ISO Store) (2009 draft)
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.
- 2012 The Standard C++ Foundation founded
- 2013 The C++ Programming Language, 4th edition
- 2014 C++14 (ISO Store) (ANSI Store) (2014 final draft)
Minor revision of the C++ standard
- 2015 Filesystem library TS (ISO/IEC TS 18822:2015) (ISO Store) (2014 draft)
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.
- 2015 Extensions for Parallelism TS (ISO/IEC TS 19570:2015) (ISO Store) (2015 draft)
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.
- 2015 Extensions for Concepts TS (ISO/IEC TS 19217:2015) (ISO Store) (2015 draft)
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.
- 2016 Extensions for Concurrency TS (ISO/IEC TS 19571:2016) (ISO Store) (2015 draft)
This TS extends the C++ library to include several extensions to std::future, latches and barriers, and atomic smart pointers.
- 2017 C++17 (ISO Store) (ANSI Store) (n4659 (2017-03-21 final draft))
The major revision of the C++ standard after C++11
- 2017 Extensions for Ranges TS (ISO/IEC TS 21425:2017) (ISO Store) (2017 draft)
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);
- 2017 Extensions for Coroutines TS (ISO/IEC TS 22277:2017) (ISO Store) (2017 draft)
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.
- 2018 Extensions for Networking TS (ISO/IEC TS 19216:2018) (ISO Store) (2017 draft)
This TS extends the C++ library to include TCP/IP networking based on boost.asio.
- 2018 Extensions for modules TS (ISO/IEC TS 21544:2018) (ISO Store) (2018 draft)
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.
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.
- 2020 C++20 (ISO Store) (n4860 (2020-03-31 final draft))
The major revision of the C++ standard after C++17
- 2021 Reflection TS (ISO/IEC TS 23619:2021) (ISO store) (2020 draft)
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
- Experimental technical specifications
- 2023 C++23 (2021-10-23 draft)
The next major revision of the C++ standard