Herb Sutter

Herb Sutter is a prominent C++ expert. He is also a book author and was a columnist for Dr. Dobb's Journal. He joined Microsoft in 2002 as a platform evangelist for Visual C++ .NET, rising to lead software architect for C++/CLI. Sutter has served as secretary and convener of the ISO C++ standards committee for over 10 years. In September 2008 he was replaced by P. J. Plauger. He then re-assumed the convener position, after Plauger resigned in October 2009. In recent years Sutter was lead designer for C++/CX and C++ AMP.

Education and career

Sutter was born and raised in Oakville, Ontario, before studying 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.

Guru of the Week

From 1997 to 2003, Sutter regularly created C++ programming problems and posted them on the Usenet newsgroup comp.lang.c++.moderated, under the title Guru of the Week. The problems generally addressed common misconceptions or poorly understood concepts in C++. Sutter later published expanded versions of many of the problems in his first two books, Exceptional C++ and More Exceptional C++. New articles, mostly related to C++11, were published since November 2011.

The Free Lunch Is Over

"The Free Lunch Is Over" is an article from Herb Sutter published in 2005. It stated that microprocessor serial-processing speed is reaching a physical limit, which leads to two main consequences:

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