On the Future of C++

There’s been talk for a number of years now on the decline of C++ and
the rise of virtual machine and scripting language. But certainly from
where I sit, the C/C++ community is still very strong. In fact, I still
see many more C applications than C++, especially in the Linux and
embedded worlds. Though, everyone agrees, for large applications, doing
them in C++ instead of C makes sense.

But
I have to admit, for desktop applications, I’m not sure C++ is the
right answer like it was in the 1990’s. We’re certainly seeing Java,
with the help of Eclipse, and C# on the .Net side, take a much bigger
chunk of the pie chart. And I think that’s the right approach. The
richness of these environments naturally enables a developer to be much
more productive than in the C++ world, especially when dealing with the
user via graphical interfaces. I’m pretty much ready to concede this
space to those languages. Sad, but true.

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