C++ and OpenMP can be used together to create fast and maintainable parallel programs. However, there are some challenges to parallelizing C++ code using OpenMP due to inconsistencies between the C++ and OpenMP specifications. Objects used in OpenMP clauses like shared, private, and firstprivate require special handling of constructors, destructors, and assignment operators. Parallelizing C++ loops can also be problematic if the loop index is not an integer type or if the loop uses STL iterators. STL containers introduce additional issues for parallelization related to initialization and data distribution across processors.