Why learn about C++11/C++14? Safer, faster as well as easier and more fun to use

C++11 is a new major version of the C++ standard, released in 2011, and brings many new features to C++ that make the language safer, faster as well as easier and more fun to use. Every professional C++ developer will sooner or later come into contact with C++11/C++14 and introducing its advantages early can only be beneficial.

Because of all the numerous changes, the C++ creator, Bjarne Stroustrup, said that “C++11 feels like a new language”. C++14, released in 2014, brings some incremental improvements over C++11.

Some of the language features, such as the auto keyword, range-based for loops, uniform initialization and lambda functions, will immediately make the life of a programmer easier and will be seen in almost all code snippets written in C++11/14. Moreover, powerful language constructs such as rvalue references and variadic templates can also help to making a program faster and more type-safe.

The new standard library additions finally give powerful tools to the programmer’s hands without requiring third-party libraries anymore. Completely new classes for multithreading, smart pointers and regular expressions are now provided, while there have been many additions to the containers and algorithms as well.

Since their inception in 2011 and 2014, C++11/C++14 have become more and more popular and are already used in a range of projects. Their usage will continually rise and eventually become the most commonly used C++ versions.