Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by orclev 4597 days ago
Most new development isn't done in C++, all the things you're referencing are primarily legacy applications (legacy in the sense that they were originally written a long time ago, not deprecated). Most new software even at the companies you list isn't written in C++. MS for instance has thrown their weight behind C# as their go to language. Google among many things has Go to replace most of the things they used to use C++ for. I don't have any insight on Adobes usage, although I do know that most of their dev tools are built on top of Eclipse which is JVM based.

As for office suites, there's three of them out there, MS, which is C#, Apples which is ObjectiveC, and LibreOffice which so far as I know is Java.

I wouldn't be entirely surprised if a lot of the DB engines are done in C++, but I also would expect quite a few of them to be done in C as well. DB engine is a rather specialized area that demands the best performance you can possibly achieve, so something low level like C or C++ is to be expected. In order to achieve top performance you need to sacrifice ease of use so a really basic language like C or C++ is expected.

Interestingly enough looking at the source code for Firefox there is indeed some C++, but there's actually a lot more JavaScript in the Firefox source tree than there is C++.
2 comments
asynchronous13 4597 days ago
Microsoft's Office suite is primarily C++. There was an attempt to start using more C# a couple years ago, but it's still mostly C++.

On a closed-source project, it's hard to get the details. But the open source projects, however, we can get a very clear picture.

  OpenOffice: [1]
  10.4 million lines of C++
  1.2 million lines of Java

  *edit* noticed you mentioned LibreOffice, not OpenOffice
  LibreOffice: [2]
  5.7 million lines of C++
  0.4 million lines of Java

  Firefox: [3]
  4.0 million lines of C++
  1.8 million lines of C
  1.7 million lines of javascript

  MySql: [4]
  7.0 million lines of C++
  4.0 million lines of C
  0.4 million lines of javascript
  0.3 million lines of Java
The point I'm trying to make is that C++ is widely used, and definitely not used just for gaming.

> Most new development isn't done in C++

Whether or not C++ is the right choice for new development is a different question. Github posted their top 20 languages for new repositories in 2013 [5]. C++ is #6 and has more new projects than C, Objective-C and C#. Even if it's fading in popularity, that's still a lot of new projects in C++.

[1] http://www.ohloh.net/p/openoffice/analyses/latest/languages_...

[2] http://www.ohloh.net/p/libreoffice/analyses/latest/languages...

[3] https://www.ohloh.net/p/firefox/analyses/latest/languages_su...

[4] http://www.ohloh.net/p/mysql/analyses/latest/languages_summa...

[5] http://adambard.com/blog/top-github-languages-for-2013-so-fa...

link
nostrademons 4597 days ago
Most new development at Google still uses C++ (or Java). Go has been making inroads, but it is still largely used by early-adopters or small intranet or prototype applications.

Source: I work at Google and use all the languages in use at the company (including both C++ and Go) on a daily basis.

link