CvsC++

C was created by Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs in the early 1970s to write the Unix operating system. It is compact and close to the hardware: functions, structs, pointers and manual memory management with malloc and free. C++ was started by Bjarne Stroustrup in 1979 as "C with Classes" and first released commercially in 1985; most C code can be compiled as C++ with small changes.

C++ adds a great deal on top. Classes and inheritance support object-oriented design, templates enable generic code, and RAII ties resources to object lifetimes, so destructors and smart pointers such as std::unique_ptr free memory, files and locks automatically. The standard library offers containers, algorithms, strings and threads that C programmers would write by hand.

C is still the language of operating system kernels, embedded firmware, device drivers and stable interfaces between languages, where simplicity and predictability matter most. C++ dominates game engines, browsers, databases, trading systems and high-performance applications, where its abstractions help manage large codebases without giving up speed.

A common misconception is that C++ is just C with extras, or that modern C++ should be written like C. Idiomatic C++ avoids raw new and delete, uses standard containers and smart pointers, and relies on RAII; writing C-style code in C++ gives up much of its safety. Rust has also become an alternative for new systems code in both areas.