[betterunix]

If people treated C++ as a maintenance-only language and used it only for legacy code -- like COBOL -- the world would be a better place. The world would also save billions of dollars.

This is not a matter of RAII or "smart" pointers (which are not even smart enough to deal with cyclic references unless the programmer explicitly breaks the cycle). It is a matter of a language whose high-level features are constrained by low-level concerns, where the features compose poorly, and where things that are obvious (like requiring that functions with a non-void return type have a return value along every control path) are simply omitted from the standard. It is dizzying to think of how much money has been spent on bugs that were made possible by C or C++; why are we continuing to waste time and money on these languages?

[PommeDeTerre]

You're ignoring the cost of actually running the applications in question. The benefits of reduced development costs can quickly be negated if performance starts to suffer.

We see this a lot with Ruby on Rails web apps, for instance. Perhaps they're quicker to develop in many cases, and maybe they're slightly less vulnerable to certain problems than C or C++ apps are, but they are much less efficient at runtime.

This inefficiency becomes visible when more hardware, or more powerful hardware, is needed to run such web apps. This inefficiency further becomes evident when users (it's worse when they're highly-paid employees) have to literally sit and wait for the web app to do its work. Over time, these costs can add up significantly.

It can be even worse for applications that are running on millions of systems. Even slight performance decreases can sum together to be very costly at such a scale.

C and C++ are still unmatched when it comes to producing efficient applications, both in terms of CPU usage and memory usage. Languages like Go and Rust may get close, but that'll be far in the future, if ever. I think it's safe to say that scripting languages like Perl, Ruby and Python will, in general, never be as efficient as C or C++.

Maybe you see C and C++ as a "waste of time and money", but they bring significant cost reductions for many of their users. That's why they're still being used today, and while they'll be used for a long time to come.

[wfox]

Why are you ignoring HotSpot?

[PommeDeTerre]

Because it has pretty significant memory overhead, and because its runtime performance usually isn't better than compiled C or C++ code.

[wfox]

Yeah but in high performance web app the real competence for C and C++ are JVM languages (Java, Scala, etc.), not Ruby and Python. Twitter switched from Ruby to Scala/Java because Ruby performance was terrible.

Could they have used C/C++ for better performance? Yeah, but Java was goodEnough and for most high performance web apps it is GoodEnough, the cost being some more money for hardware (for Ruby and Python the cost is a lot higher and sometimes not even with expensive hardware you can solve the problems):

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?GoodEnough

Just like C++ became GoodEnough and people switched to it from C for high performance apps, just like C became GoodEnough and we switched from assembly to C.

[pretoriusB]

>If people treated C++ as a maintenance-only language and used it only for legacy code -- like COBOL -- the world would be a better place. The world would also save billions of dollars.

Citation needed. This is a wishful thinking idea that ignores tons of pragmatics in application development.