Is C++ standardized?

Yes.

The C++ standard was finalized and adopted by ISO (International Organization for Standardization) as well as several national standards organizations such as INCITS (the U.S. National Committee for Information Technology Standards), BSI (the British Standards Institute), DIN (the German national standards organization). The ISO standard was finalized and adopted by unanimous vote in November 1997, with minor updates in 2003 and now significant and valuable updates in 2011. Another set of updates is expected to be published in 2014.

The U.S. C++ committee is called “PL22.16”. The ISO C++ standards group is called “WG21”. The major players in the C++ standards process have included just about everyone: representatives from Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, the UK, and the USA, along with representatives from about a hundred companies and many interested individuals. Major players have included AT&T, Ericsson, Digital, Borland, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Intel, Mentor Graphics, Microsoft, NVidia, Silicon Graphics, Sun Microsystems, and Siemens.

Who is on the standardization committee?

The committee consists of a large number of people (about 200) out of whom about 100 turn up at the week-long meetings two or three times a year. In addition there are national standards groups and meetings in several countries. Most members contribute either by attending meetings, by taking part in email discussions, or by submitting papers for committee consideration. Most members have friends and colleagues who help them. From day #1, the committee has had members from many countries and at every meeting people from half a dozen to a dozen countries attend. The final votes are done by about 20 national standards bodies. Thus, the ISO C++ standardization is a fairly massive effort, not a small coherent group of people working to create a perfect language for “people just like themselves.” The standard is what this group of volunteers can agree on as being the best they can produce that all can live with.

Naturally, many (but not all) of these volunteers have day jobs focused on C++: They include compiler writers, tool builders, library writers, application builders, researchers, book authors, consultants, test-suite builders, and more.

Here is a very-partial list of some major organizations involved: Adobe, Apple, Boost, Bloomberg, EDG, Google, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Red Hat.

Here is a short list of names of members who you may have encountered in the literature or on the web: Dave Abrahams, Matt Austern, Pete Becker, Hans Boehm, Steve Clamage, Lawrence Crowl, Beman Dawes, Francis Glassborow, Doug Gregor, Pablo Halpern, Howard Hinnant, Jaakko Jarvi, John Lakos, Alisdair Meredith, Jens Maurer, Jason Merrill, Sean Parent, P.J. Plauger, Tom Plum, Gabriel Dos Reis, Bjarne Stroustrup, Herb Sutter, David Vandevoorde, Michael Wong. Apologies to the 200+ current and past members that we couldn’t list. Also, please note the author lists on the various papers: a standard is written by (many) individuals, not by an anonymous committee.

You can get a better impression of the breath and depth of expertise involved by examining the authors listed in the WG21 papers archive, but please remember there are major contributors to the standards effort who do not write a lot.

What is the difference between C++98 and C++03?

From a programmer’s view there is none. The C++03 revision of the standard was a bug fix release for implementers to ensure greater consistency and portability. In particular, tutorial and reference material describing C++98 and C++03 can be used interchangeably by all except compiler writers and standards gurus.

What is the difference between C++98 and C++11?

Will be covered in detail in saperate section.

Note that the C++ language will remain stable because compatibility is always a major concern. The committee tries hard not to break your (standard conforming) code. Except for some corner cases you’re unlikely to notice, all valid C++98 code is valid C++11 and C++14 code.

What is the difference between C++11 and C++14?

Will be covered in separate section.

Note that the C++ language will remain stable because compatibility is always a major concern. The committee tries hard not to break your (standard conforming) code. Except for some corner cases you’re unlikely to notice, all valid C++98 code is valid C++14 code.

What are some “interview questions” I could ask that would let me know if candidates really know their stuff?

This answer is primarily for non-technical managers and HR folks who are trying to do a good job at interviewing C++ candidates. If you’re a C++ programmer about to be interviewed, and if you’re lurking in this FAQ hoping to know the questions they’ll ask you ahead of time so you can avoid having to really learn C++, shame on you: spend your time becoming technically competent and you won’t have to try to “cheat” your way through life!

Back to the non-technical manager / HR person: obviously you are eminently qualified to judge whether a candidate is a good “fit” with your company’s culture. However there are enough charlatans, wannabes, and posers out there that you really need to team up with someone who is technically competent in order to make sure the candidate has the right level of technical skill. A lot of companies have been burned by hiring nice but incompetent duds — people who were incompetent in spite of the fact that they knew the answers to a few obscure questions. The only way to smoke out the posers and wannabes is to get someone in with you who can ask penetrating technical questions. You have no hope whatsoever of doing that yourself. Even if I gave you a bunch of “tricky questions,” they wouldn’t smoke out the bad guys.

Your technical sidekick might not be (and often isn’t) qualified to judge the candidate on personality or soft skills, so please don’t abdicate your role as the final arbiter in the decision making process. But please don’t think you can ask a half dozen C++ questions and have the slightest clue if the candidate really knows what they’re talking about from a technical perspective.

Having said all that, if you’re technical enough to read the C++ FAQ, you can dig up a lot of good interview questions here. The FAQ has a lot of goodies that will separate the wheat from the chaff. The FAQ focuses on what programmers should do, as opposed to merely what the compiler will let them do. There are things that can be done in C++ but shouldn’t be done. The FAQ helps people separate those two.

What does the FAQ mean by “such and such is evil”?

It means such and such is something you should avoid most of the time, but not something you should avoid all the time. For example, you will end up using these “evil” things whenever they are “the least evil of the evil alternatives.” It’s a joke, okay? Don’t take it too seriously.

The real purpose of the term (“Ah ha,” I hear you saying, “there really is a hidden motive!”; you’re right: there is) is to shake new C++ programmers free from some of their old thinking. For example, C programmers who are new to C++ often use pointers, arrays and/or #define more than they should. The FAQ lists those as “evil” to give new C++ programmers a vigorous (and droll!) shove in the right direction. The goal of farcical things like “pointers are evil” is to convince new C++ programmers that C++ really isn’t “just like C except for those silly // comments.”

Now let’s get real here. I’m not suggesting macros or arrays or pointers are right up there with murder or kidnapping. Well, maybe pointers. (Just kidding!) So don’t get all hyper about the word “evil”: it’s supposed to sound a little outrageous. And don’t look for a technically precise definition of exactly when something is or isn’t “evil”: there isn’t one.

Items labeled as “evil” (macros, arrays, pointers, etc.) aren’t always bad in all situations. When they are the “least bad” of the alternatives, use them!

Will I sometimes use any so-called “evil” constructs?

Of course you will!

One size does not fit all. Stop. Right now, take out a fine-point marker and write on the inside of your glasses: Software Development Is Decision Making. “Think” is not a four-letter word. There are very few “never…” and “always…” rules in software — rules that you can apply without thinking — rules that always work in all situations in all markets — one-size-fits-all rules.

In plain English, you will have to make decisions, and the quality of your decisions will affect the business value of your software. Software development is not mostly about slavishly following rules; it is a matter of thinking and making tradeoffs and choosing. And sometimes you will have to choose between a bunch of bad options. When that happens, the best you can hope for is to choose the least bad of the alternatives, the lesser of the “evils.”

You will occasionally use approaches and techniques labeled as “evil.” If that makes you uncomfortable, mentally change the word “evil” to “frequently undesirable”

Is it important to know the technical definition of “good OO”? Of “good class design”?

You might not like this, but the short answer is, “No.” (With the caveat that this answer is directed to practitioners, not theoreticians.)

Mature software designers evaluate situations based on business criteria (time, money and risk) in addition to technical criteria like whether something is or is not “good OO” or “good class design.” This is a lot harder since it involves business issues (schedule, skill of the people, finding out where the company wants to go so we know where to design flexibility into the software, willingness to factor in the likelihood of future changes - changes that are likely rather than merely theoretically possible, etc.) in addition to technical issues. However it results in decisions that are a lot more likely to bring good business results.

As a developer, you have a fiduciary responsibility to your employer to invest only in ways that have a reasonable expectation for a return on that investment. If you don’t ask the business questions in addition to the technical questions, you will make decisions that have random and unpredictable business consequences.

Like it or not, what that means in practice is that you’re probably better off leaving terms like “good class design” and “good OO” undefined. In fact I believe precise, pure-technical definitions of those terms can be dangerous and can cost companies money, ultimately perhaps even costing people their jobs. That sounds bizarre, but there’s a really good reason: if these terms are defined in precise, pure-technical terms, well-meaning developers tend to ignore business considerations in their desire to fulfill these pure-technical definitions of “good.”

Any purely technical definition of “good,” such as “good OO” or “good design” or anything else that can be evaluated without regard to schedule, business objectives (so we know where to invest), expected future changes, corporate culture with respect to a willingness to invest in the future, skill levels of the team that will be doing the maintenance, etc., is dangerous. It is dangerous because it deceives programmers into thinking they are making “right” decisions when in reality they might be making decisions that have terrible consequences. Or those decisions might not have terrible business consequences, but that’s the point: when you ignore business considerations while making decisions, the business consequences will be random and somewhat unpredicatable. That’s bad.

It is a simple fact that business issues dominate technical issues, and any definition of “good” that fails to acknowledge that fact is bad.

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Aiming to spread the Information Technology we are not just limited to software development but we wish to spread our technology as far as we can to each hand. We called this a "Human Being Technology" a technology that can be used and understand by any of the human who has never used or understand the software and its capability.

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