Herb Sutter

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.

Herb Sutter in 2009

Education and career

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

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

He joined Microsoft in 2002^[2] as a platform evangelist for Visual C++ .NET,^{[citation needed]} rising to lead software architect for C++/CLI.^[3][4] In recent years Sutter was lead designer for C++/CX and C++ AMP.^[4] In November 2024, after 22 years at Microsoft, Sutter left to join Citadel Securities.^[5]

Sutter has served as the chair of the ISO C++ standards committee since 2002.^[6][3][4]

In 2005, Sutter published an article titled "The Free Lunch Is Over"^[7] 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.^[8][9][3]

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)