Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tralarpa 1698 days ago
Could you explain what kind of projects nowadays use C++? I'm not up to date at all anymore. Used a lot of C++ until about 2010 (for simulations and Windows programming).
4 comments

Still used a lot in scientific programming. Especially with long-lived projects, but even now new C++ projects start up.

It’s a combination of institutional knowledge, domain-specific libraries, and low-level, hpc capabilities that keep C++ being used.

(C++ for low-level stuff, python for the glue is a common paradigm in scientific computing)

> Could you explain what kind of projects nowadays use C++? I'm not up to date at all anymore. Used a lot of C++ until about 2010 (for simulations and Windows programming).

All browsers you use are written in C++ (Firefox, Chrome...). Node.js is written in C++.

We live in that bizarre world, where on one side we have C, an antiquated and simplistic language and on the other C++ a monster of complexity that provides also basic modern stuff C will never have.

Rust has complexity of its own but it's more like a "philosophical" complexity rather than syntactic. A lot of C and C++ developers just don't like how Rust works.

High-performance database engines and similar data infrastructure are almost exclusively written in modern C++ these days. They benefit immensely from new C++ features.
Game development using Unreal Engine, which has a C++ API [0]

[0] https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/features/c-api