Creator of C++: Bell Labs, Negative Overhead Abstraction, Mistakes | Bjarne Stroustrup

Creator of C++: Bell Labs, Negative Overhead Abstraction, Mistakes | Bjarne Stroustrup

From The Peterman Pod by Ryan Peterman

May 18, 2026 ยท 1h 59m

About this episode

Bjarne Stroustrup discusses the creation of C++ and shares insights from his time at Bell Labs.

Bjarne Stroustrup is the creator of the C++ programming language and a former researcher at Bell Labs. We talked about what Bell Labs was like, programming language design, and interesting anecdotes from his experience. โ€ข My ergonomic keyboard project I mentioned, you can follow along here: https://read.compose.llc/ ๐—ฃ๐—ผ๐—ฑ๐—ฐ๐—ฎ๐˜€๐˜ ๐—น๐—ถ๐—ป๐—ธ๐˜€: โ€ข YouTube: https://youtu.be/U46fJ2bJ-co โ€ข Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-peterman-pod/id1777363835 โ€ข Transcript: https://www.developing.dev/p/creator-of-c-bell-labs-negative-overhead ๐—ง๐—ต๐—ฎ๐—ป๐—ธ ๐˜†๐—ผ๐˜‚ ๐˜๐—ผ ๐˜๐—ต๐—ถ๐˜€ ๐—ฒ๐—ฝ๐—ถ๐˜€๐—ผ๐—ฑ๐—ฒ'๐˜€ ๐˜€๐—ฝ๐—ผ๐—ป๐˜€๐—ผ๐—ฟ๐˜€ ๐—ณ๐—ผ๐—ฟ ๐˜€๐˜‚๐—ฝ๐—ฝ๐—ผ๐—ฟ๐˜๐—ถ๐—ป๐—ด ๐—บ๐˜† ๐˜„๐—ผ๐—ฟ๐—ธ: โ€ข Cursor 3: a unified workspace for building software with agents, check it out at https://cursor.com/ โ€ข WorkOS: makes your app Enterprise Ready with easy to use APIs to add SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and more in just a few lines of code, check them out at https://workos.com/ ๐—ง๐—ถ๐—บ๐—ฒ๐˜€๐˜๐—ฎ๐—บ๐—ฝ๐˜€: 0:00 - Intro 0:50 - The origin of C++ 8:46 - What Bell Labs was like 17:24 - Dennis Ritchie 24:00 - When to build a programming language 31:59 - Bootstrapping a language 33:58 - C++ is not object-oriented 37:32 - Discussing type systems 46:20 - Memoryโ€ฆ

People in this episode

Host: Ryan Peterman

Guest: Bjarne Stroustrup

Topics covered

  • C++ programming language
  • Bell Labs
  • programming language design
  • memory safety
  • type systems
  • automatic garbage collection

Keywords

  • C++
  • Bell Labs
  • programming languages
  • memory safety
  • type systems
  • automatic garbage collection
  • software development

Sponsors

Cursor 3, WorkOS

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Bell Labs

Products: Cursor 3

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