Ryan Peterman (@ryanlpeterman)

Bjarne Stroustrup is the creator of C++ and a former researcher at Bell Labs at its peak. I interviewed him about: • What made Bell Labs different • Programming language design: types, memory safety, bootstrapping • When abstraction improves performance • Anecdotes from building C++ • Thoughts on AI writing C++ • Mistakes he'd change while building C++ Where to watch: • YouTube: • Spotify: • Apple Podcasts: • Transcript: Thank you to this episode's sponsors for supporting my work: • Cursor 3: a unified workspace for building software with agents, check it out at • WorkOS: makes your app Enterprise Ready with easy to use APIs to add SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and more in just a few lines of code, check them out at Timestamps: 0:00 - Intro 0:50 - The origin of C++ 8:46 - What Bell Labs was like 17:24 - Dennis Ritchie 24:00 - When to build a programming language 31:59 - Bootstrapping a language 33:58 - C++ is not object-oriented 37:32 - Discussing type systems 46:20 - Memory safety 49:26 - Standards committee anecdotes 1:09:40 - Adding automatic garbage collection to C++ 1:18:25 - Template instantiation is Turing complete 1:21:57 - Abstraction and performance 1:28:51 - AI writing code 1:35:54 - His motivation 1:39:18 - Famous quotes 1:46:48 - Reflecting on building C++ 1:49:12 - Top C++ book recommendation 1:50:59 - Advice for his younger self 1:58:06 - Outro