C++ (pronounced cee plus plus) is a general purpose programming language developed by Bjarne Stroustrup starting in 1979 at Bell Labs. It is immensely popular, particularly for applications that require speed and/or access to some low-level features. It is considered to be an intermediate level language, as it encapsulates both high and low level language features.

C++ supports procedural, object-oriented, functional and generic programming. Compilers for C++ are available for essentially every platform, including Windows, Mac OS, and Linux.

Key Benefits:

• Type safety: Encapsulate necessary unsafe operations
• Resource safety: Not all resource management is managing memory
• Performance: For some parts of almost all systems, it's important
• Predictability: For hard and soft real-time systems
• Teachability: Complexity of code should be proportional to the complexity of the task
• Readability: People and machines ("analyzability")
• Direct map to hardware: of instructions and fundamental data types
• Zero-overhead abstraction: Classes with constructors and destructors, inheritance, generic programming, functional programming techniques

The standard for C++ is maintained by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and the current version of C++ as of June 2018 is C++17 (named not as the 17th version of C++, but rather signifying that the standard was ratified in 2017).

The best thing about C++ is that it runs on everything from embedded processors with very limited resources to the largest mainframe supercomputer and every personal computer in between.