ISO/IEC 14882:2011 specifies requirements for implementations of the C++ programming language. The first such requirement is that they implement the language, and so ISO/IEC 14882:2011 also defines C++. Other requirements and relaxations of the first requirement appear at various places within ISO/IEC 14882:2011.

C++ is a general purpose programming language based on the C programming language as specified in ISO/IEC 9899:1999. In addition to the facilities provided by C, C++ provides additional data types, classes, templates, exceptions, namespaces, operator overloading, function name overloading, references, free store management operators, and additional library facilities.