C++ The ISO C++ Standard
Introduction
In 1998, the there was a first publication of the standard making C++ an internally standardized language. From that time, C++ has evolved resulting in different dialects of C++. On this page, you can find an overview of all different standards and their changes compared to the previous version. The details on how to use these features is described on more specialized pages.
Remarks
When C++ is mentioned, often a reference is made to "the Standard". But what is exactly that standard?
C++ has a long history. Started as a small project by Bjarne Stroustrup within Bell Labs, by the early 90's it had become quite popular. Multiple companies were creating C++ compilers so that users could run their C++ compilers on a wide range of computers. But in order to facilitate this, all these competing compilers should share a single definition of the language.
At that point, the C language had successfully been standardized. This means that a formal description of the language was written. This was submitted to the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), which opened up the document for review and subsequently published it in 1989. One year later, the International Organization for Standards (Because it would have different acronyms in different languages they chose one form, ISO, derived from the Greek isos, meaning equal.) adopted the American standard as an International Standard.
For C++, it was clear from the beginning that there was an international interest. A workgroup within ISO was started (known as WG21, within SubCommittee 22). This workgroup drafted a first standard around 1995. But as we programmers know, there's nothing more dangerous to a planned delivery than last minute features, and that happened to C++ as well. In 1995, a cool new library named the STL surfaced, and the people working in WG21 decided to add a slimmed-down version to the C++ draft standard. Naturally, this caused the deadlines to be missed and only 3 years later did the document become final. ISO is a very formal organization, so the C++ Standard was christened with the not very marketable name of ISO/IEC 14882. As standards can be updated, this exact version became known as 14882:1998.
And indeed there was a demand to update the Standard. The Standard is a very thick document, which aims to exactly describe how C++ compilers should work. Even a slight ambiguity can be worth fixing, so by 2003 an update was released as 14882:2003. However, this did not add any feature to C++; the new features were scheduled for the second update.
Informally, this second update was known as C++0x, because it wasn't known whether this would take until 2008 or 2009. Well - that version also got a slight delay, which is why it became 14882:2011.
Luckily, WG21 decided not to let that happen again. C++11 was well-received and let to a renewed interest in C++. So, to keep the momentum, the third update went from planning to publishing in 3 years, to become 14882:2014.
The work didn't stop there, either. The C++17 standard has been proposed and the work for C++20 has been started.
