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. C++ runs on a variety of platforms, such as Windows, Mac OS, and the various versions of UNIX.
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 December 2014 is C++14 (named not as the 14th version of C++, but rather signifying that the standard was ratified in 2014).
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.