| Point 1 is mostly down to history I suspect. The big Adobe stuff is in C++ because they started writing them when C++ was The Thing. Probably quite cutting-edge then (not that it doesn't have some cutting-edge features now of course, that's what makes C++17 and C++20 and so on worth watching). Windows, Office likewise, although I've always assumed that an increasing chunk of Office is now written in C#. I have no evidence of that by the way. KDE - again of its time. Autodesk, likewise. And then that gives you a huge historical inertia. Chrome started out using KDE's rendering engine, which was written in C++, at a time when writing cross-platform GUIs wasn't really feasible in anything else if you wanted it to also be reasonably fast. And they stay in C++ because changing languages is a right pain in the whatsit, and C++'s ABI is so variable across platforms and compiler versions through history that integrating components in other languages is often not worth the effort to maintain. Not that it hasn't been done, of course, and done well. Look at how Firefox are now integrating Rust components in their C++ codebase - although they're doing it by relying on Rust's ability to expose a perfect C ABI, and C++'s ability to call it. Point 2... yeah. I get this. C++ has a higher complexity bound than many languages, especially dynamic ones. C++ used as C++ rather than C-with-classes has a strong type checker and some very robust capabilities around memory management, program integrity, metaprogramming (even though the syntax is dire and the compile times are horrible). C++ expertise in large software construction is widely available. C++ will compile down to efficient machine code that runs well on many platforms. These are all huge advantages in large projects. Python has its troubles with concurrency, and the lack of type information in the source code to help maintainers. Go is just too young - I suspect we're going to see some really giant Go projects emerging over the next ten years, especially outside the space you can see on GitHub. There will be big enterprises deploying enormous Go codebases, although they'll likely be made up of multiple components instead of one giant thing like we used to do. Rust's too young, Haskell's got the chops but is too weird for most people (and its own problems, although Stack has really helped with the developer experience), JavaScript is entirely unsuitable to a large maintainable codebase. I'd guess TypeScript can probably go a bit further then Python in that space, at least until Python's new type annotations start getting fully checked by tooling at which point it returns to parity (or exceeds it, due to not being JavaScript in disguise. Guess what, I don't like JavaScript, who'd've thought!) But still we've got C++'s inertia to thank for a lot of this. It's huge, it's old, it's still being developed and still being used and there's a lot of knowledge and a lot of capability out there. But then look at newer disciplines. Look at mobile apps - yes you can write C++, but the native languages of Android are Java and Kotlin, and of iOS are Objective-C and Swift. What are new developers going to want to do - learn Kotlin and Swift or figure out how to shim C++ into those platforms via the variously awkward methods available? What about the web? How many web applications are written in C++? Very few, I suspect. It's all C#, Java, PHP, Node, Python and other modern things which may or may not be considered sexy. C++ dominates in the older disciplines, the older software that's still here and we still use and will use for a very long time. I think elsewhere it's being passed by, especially as we get languages like Rust and Go which are considered as possible replacements in the "I really need this to go as fast as possible" camp. It's a shame really, as C++ is still a powerful, impressive language and the new stuff is fantastic. But I always felt when I was working as a C++ developer that I wished I could turn off those C-compatible core behaviours and completely block those implicit-but-dangerous type conversions, and get the compiler to scream at me about dangerous pointer usage (I believe something along those lines is in the works for a future standard). And also a shame about D, which has its followers but has been largely ignored, overshadowed by C++ to start with and later passed by the new languages which get all the hype. |