History Of C++

 The C++ is an object oriented programming language. It is an extension of the C programming language, developed by Danish Computer Scientist Bjarne Stroustrup at Bell Telephone Laboratories(now know as Nokia Bell Labs) starting in 1979. 

In 1979, Bjarne Stroustrup began the work on "C with classes" the prototype for C++ adding features like classes and inheritance to C. The motivation for creating new language was inspired from Simula that supported classes, objects, inheritance but was slow for system level programming, Stroustrup wanted a language that was combination of both C and Simula. 

C programing language was chosen because it was general-purpose, fast, portable and widely used. In addition to C and Simula's influences, other language influenced this new language, including ALGOL 68 , Ada ,CLU and ML. Initially, Stroustrup's "C with Classes" added features to the C compiler, Cpre, including classes, derived classes, strong typing, inlining, and default arguments. 

ORIGIN

In 1982, Stroustrup started to develop a successor to C with Classes, which he named "C++" (++ being the increment operator in C) after going through several other names. Features such as virtual function, function and operator overloading, references, constants , type-safe free memory allocation (new/delete), improved type checking and BCPL -style single-line comments with two forward slashes (//). Furthermore , Stroustrup developed a new standalone compiler for C++.

In 1984, Stroustrup implemented the first stream input/output library. The idea of providing an output operator rather than a named output function was suggested by Dough Mcllroy. In 1985, the first edition of The C++ Programming Language was released, which became the definitive reference for the language, as there was not yet an official standard. The first commercial implementation of C++ was released in October of the same year. n 1989, C++ 2.0 was released, followed by the updated second edition of The C++ Programming Language in 1991. New features in 2.0 included multiple inheritance, abstract classes, static member functions, const member functions, and protected members. In 1990, The Annotated C++ Reference Manual was published. This work became the basis for the future standard. Later feature additions included templates, exceptions, namespaces, new casts, and a Boolean type.

The first official standard was released: C++98

Key addition: Standard Template Library (STL) which introduced: vectors, lists, stacks, queues, iterators, algorithms. This made C++ extremely powerful for large software systems.

2003 (C++03) Minor improvements and bug fixes.
2011 (Major Update) C++11

Added modern features like: Auto keyword, Lambda expressions, Smart pointers, Move semantics, Multithreading support

Later Versions : C++14,C++17,C++20,C++23
These versions improved: performance, concurrency, generic programming, compile-time programming.

The main goal was: “To create a language that supports abstraction and object-oriented programming while maintaining the efficiency of C.”