Hi, I’m Charles Torre, Sr. Technographer with Channel 9. I’m back with an interview made last week with Herb Sutter, Principal Architect on the Visual C++ team at Microsoft and chairman of the ISO committee which recently approved the final technical changes to the C++0x standard – the publication of which is expected this summer. Go C++11!!! 🙂

It’s always great to talk to Herb. In this specific conversation, it’s uplifting to see how excited Herb is for the future of one of the world’s most capable and widely used general purpose programming languages. C++ is a modern programming language for power and performance, but it’s also a highly abstracted general purpose language for building user mode applications, mobile apps, etc. The amazing part is how C++ can provide rich general programming abstractions and also ensure that your code can run at machine speeds. We talk about this, of course.

See below for the specific questions that were asked. You can simply click on a link to move directly to that point in the conversation. I do, however, strongly recommend that you watch the entire thing.

Tune in. Learn. Go native!

1:37 -> What were the goals of the C++0x standard, at a high level?

2:40 -> Language and Library abstractions and performance (how high can you go and still be fast as possible?)…

5:23 -> C++ as an application development language (in addition to the traditional C++ is a systems programming language meme)…

07:17 -> C++0x or can we now call it C++11?

09:21 -> Standards committees and real world user representation…

10:39 -> Who comes up with the new features that get standardized (or not…)?

13:01 -> What were the goals of the C++0x standard (non-canned answer)?

14:21 -> What does Bjarne mean by C++0x being a better C++ for novice programmers?

15:51 -> Why can’t C++ look more like C#?

18:50 -> At the end of the day, everything(in terms of programmer-controlled computing) boils down to memory, right?

23:12 -> What are some of the most significant new features in C++0x?

25:05 -> What can VC++ developers expect to see in terms of C++0x implementation in Visual C++ next?

27:09 -> C++ and type safety…

29:05 -> C++0x and backwards compatibility: any big breaking changes?

34:16 -> C++0x in the Standard Library…

37:01 -> Any thinking in the Committee about doing more frequent experimental releases C++?

39:04 -> Are their features that didn’t make it into the standard that you really wanted to be standardized?

41:45 -> Are you comfortable with C++’s current state? Is it modern enough?

43:22 -> Conclusion (or Charles doesn’t end the conversation when his farewell begins – where does it go from there? )