Introduction
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.
From 1995 to 2001 he was chief technology officer at PeerDirect where he designed the PeerDirect database replication engine.
He joined Microsoft in 2002 as a platform evangelist for Visual C++ .NET, rising to lead software architect for C++/CLI. In recent years Sutter was lead designer for C++/CX and C++ AMP. In November 2024, after 22 years at Microsoft, Sutter left to join Citadel Securities.
Sutter has served as the chair of the ISO C++ standards committee since 2002.
In 2005, Sutter published an article titled "The Free Lunch Is Over" 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.
Bibliography
- Exceptional C++ (Addison-Wesley, 2000, ISBN 0-201-61562-2)
- More Exceptional C++ (Addison-Wesley, 2002, ISBN 0-201-70434-X)
- Exceptional C++ Style (Addison-Wesley, 2005, ISBN 0-201-76042-8)
- C++ Coding Standards (together with Andrei Alexandrescu, Addison-Wesley, 2005, ISBN 0-321-11358-6)