C++ is a general-purpose, compiled programming language that Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup began developing at Bell Labs in 1979 as an extension of the C language. It gives programmers close control over memory and hardware while supporting object-oriented and generic programming, which makes it a common choice where speed matters. In finance it is used for exchange matching engines, algorithmic trading systems and risk software. In crypto, the reference implementation of Bitcoin, Bitcoin Core, is written mainly in C++, as are several other blockchainclients. Its main drawback is that manual memory management can lead to security bugs if code is not written carefully. Also see Solidity.