[osullivj]

Strongly agree on the inordinate number of features point. Which other mainstream OO language supports dynamic & static dispatch, single & multiple inheritance, interface inheritance via abstract classes, generic types and functions via templates, lambdas, type inference, and operator overloading? Roll that up with C compatibility, a 30 year history of evolution, and the complexity of commonly adopted libraries like STL & Boost, and there's simply no avoiding it. There's a lot of C++ out there, and I'm confident that will pay the bills for years to come for this 50 something 25 year C++ veteran!

[nextos]

I think that's spot on. I coded quite a lot of C++ in the early 2000s. Now I'm considering to jump onboard again. C++11 and successors are almost a different language.

More importantly, for my niche I don't see anything that can readily replace C++. Rust has very little support for scientific computing. Julia is great, and will replace my high level statistical inference code, but it's not designed to let me design low-level close-to-the-metal data structures. Scala has memory issues, which will be hopefully less problematic once value types are implemented in the JVM. OCaml and F# look interesting, I haven't evaluated these carefully.

[poster123]

If you are doing scientific computing, have you considered Fortran? The gfortran (GCC Fortran) compiler supports Fortran 2003, which has object-oriented features, and since Fortran 90 the language has had array operations and syntax similar to Matlab or Python with numpy.

[nextos]

I'm not a big fan of Fortran for my particular domain, which includes lots of strings (biological sequences). Here Fortran is not as quick. See for example the k-nucleotide benchmark:

https://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/performance.ph...

[pjmlp]

I worked with a customer that was using .NET for DNA sequencing.

Not sure what tricks they pulled off regarding unsafe code and parallelism, but it was fully done in C#.

[vram22]

What are Scala's memory issues?