C++ was designed to support a wide range of programming styles. A parallel extension to C++ should support parallelism in all the different programming styles that a C++ program might exploit as well as support a broad range of parallel programming paradigms, such as message passing, active objects and shared memory concurrency. Compositional C++ (CC++) is a parallel C++ that was designed with these goals in mind. In this article, we motivate the design of CC++ and provide a brief overview of the language. We will illustrate how CC++ can be used to define a reusable parallel paradigm libraries and describe how one parallel application used CC++ language features to combine different types of parallelism in a single application.