Herb Sutter Explained

Herb Sutter is a prominent C++ expert. He is also an author of several books on C++ and was a columnist for Dr. Dobb's Journal.

Education and career

Sutter was born and raised in Oakville, Ontario, and studied computer science at Canada's University of Waterloo.^[1]

From 1995 to 2001 he was chief technology officer at PeerDirect where he designed the PeerDirect database replication engine.^[1]

He joined Microsoft in 2002^[2] as a platform evangelist for Visual C++ .NET, rising to lead software architect for C++/CLI.^[3] In recent years Sutter was lead designer for C++/CX and C++ AMP.

Sutter has served as the chair of the ISO C++ standards committee since 2002.^{[4] [5]}

In 2005, Sutter published an article titled "The Free Lunch Is Over"^[6] that claimed that microprocessor serial-processing speed was reaching a physical limit leading to two main consequences:

• processor manufacturers would focus on products that better support multithreading (such as multi-core processors), and
• software developers would be forced to develop massively multithreaded programs as a way to better use such processors.

The article is seen as highly influential in subsequent system design.^{[7] [8]}

Bibliography

• Exceptional C++ (Addison-Wesley, 2000,)
• More Exceptional C++ (Addison-Wesley, 2002,)
• Exceptional C++ Style (Addison-Wesley, 2005,)
• C++ Coding Standards (together with Andrei Alexandrescu, Addison-Wesley, 2005,)

Notes and References

1. Web site: WG21 (ISO C++ Committee) Members. isocpp.org.
2. Web site: ISO/ANSI C++ Standards Committee Secretary Herb Sutter Joins Microsoft’s Developer Division . March 13, 2002 . 4 April 2024 . Redmond . Wash . news.microsoft.com.
3. Web site: Redlich . Michael . QCon New York 2023: Day Three Recap . InfoQ . 12 September 2023.
4. News: Clarke . Gavin . Sutter: C++11 kicks old-school coding into 21st century . 14 September 2023 . October 11, 2011.
5. News: Heller . Martin . Beyond C++: The promise of Rust, Carbon, and Cppfront . 12 September 2023 . InfoWorld . November 14, 2022.
6. Sutter . H. . 2005 . The free lunch is over: A fundamental turn toward concurrency in software . Dr. Dobb's Journal . 30 . 3 .
7. News: Miller . Paul . Why would you want a 1,000 core processor? . 12 September 2023 . The Verge . June 23, 2016. Are you familiar with the highly influential piece for programmers by Herb Sutter called "The Free Lunch Is Over"?.
8. Web site: Schirrmeister . Frank . Toward A Lingua Franca For Intelligent System Design . Semiconductor Engineering . 26 September 2019 . 12 September 2023.