Compatibility of C and C++

The C and C++ programming languages are closely related but have many significant differences. C++ began as a fork of an early, pre-standardized C, and was designed to be mostly source-and-link compatible with C compilers of the time. Due to this, development tools for the two languages (such as IDEs and compilers) are often integrated into a single product, with the programmer able to specify C or C++ as their source language. The C and C++ programming languages are closely related but have many significant differences. C++ began as a fork of an early, pre-standardized C, and was designed to be mostly source-and-link compatible with C compilers of the time. Due to this, development tools for the two languages (such as IDEs and compilers) are often integrated into a single product, with the programmer able to specify C or C++ as their source language. However, C is not a subset of C++,, and consequently some C programs will not compile as C++ code without modification. Likewise, C++ introduces many features that are not available in C and in practice almost all code written in C++ is not conforming C code. This article, however, focuses on differences that cause conforming C code to be ill-formed C++ code, or to be conforming/well-formed in both languages but to behave differently in C and C++. Bjarne Stroustrup, the creator of C++, has suggested that the incompatibilities between C and C++ should be reduced as much as possible in order to maximize inter-operability between the two languages. Others have argued that since C and C++ are two different languages, compatibility between them is useful but not vital; according to this camp, efforts to reduce incompatibility should not hinder attempts to improve each language in isolation. The official rationale for the 1999 C standard (C99) 'endorse the principle of maintaining the largest common subset' between C and C++ 'while maintaining a distinction between them and allowing them to evolve separately', and stated that the authors were 'content to let C++ be the big and ambitious language.' Several additions of C99 are not supported in the current C++ standard or conflicted with C++ features, such as variable-length arrays, native complex number types and the restrict type qualifier. On the other hand, C99 reduced some other incompatibilities compared with C89 by incorporating C++ features such as // comments and mixed declarations and code. C++ enforces stricter typing rules (no implicit violations of the static type system), and initialization requirements (compile-time enforcement that in-scope variables do not have initialization subverted) than C, and so some valid C code is disallowed in C++. A rationale for these is provided in Annex C.1 of the ISO C++ standard.