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by faoileag 1923 days ago
Just a few things you should consider: - C++ is highly complex. The poster lower down claiming you already know 90% if you know C#/ObjC is simply wrong. The learning curve is steep. - Your stated experience sounds a bit like "App developer" and while that gives you plenty of experience, the projects tend to be a bit smallish. C++ projects on the other hand can be huge and extremely complex. Think 4 hrs for a clean build, with 10+ people working on the same code base. You should consider if such a change is for you. - Then again, the salaries you can draw as C++ developer reflect all that, especially the fact that C++ is not an easy language to pick up. - Since you claim to be from Southern Germany: the automotive industry is particularly strong in that region. And not only in Stuttgart or Munich but also in e.g. Ulm. And they do most, if not all, their stuff in C++. - C++ is going to stay. Software development for automotive is done in C/C++ as the MISRA standard more or less mandates it. And I do not know of any effort to change that, even by newer players in the field. So: don't worry. Learning C++ to a sufficiently advanced level will be a very good career investment, even in the long term. - It is difficult to "vet" language in terms of the future they have. But as a rule of thumb you can say: the larger / more complex the code base, the longer the language will be around. C++ has a huge and complex code base, and companies tend to be conservative with such "investments". Shipyards still use Fortran, banks still use COBOL. Perl is still actively used in web development, despite Ruby on Rails. - Finally: perhaps you are looking at the whole situation from the wrong angle, i.e. career advancement / employer loyalty. Why not instead ask yourself: what projects do I want to work on, and in what kind of industry? Then find out which language is pervasive through that domain and learn that. After all: C++ is modern compared to C. And there is still plenty of embedded development going on in C.
1 comments

> C++ projects on the other hand can be huge and extremely complex. Think 4 hrs for a clean build, with 10+ people working on the same code base.

I'm not sure what this has to do with the language itself or why you think other languages don't also have large projects written in them.

OP sounds like an app developer. They are saying that apps typically aren’t projects of that size
And plenty of C++ projects also aren't projects of that size. I'm not sure what that has to do with whether or not OP should learn C++. Should OP not learn C because the Linux kernel is written in it?
Don't know why you're downvoted because you're absolutely right. Just because some very large C++ projects can take hours to build, I'd say this is not true for the majority of projects.