News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Two Weeks of Rust by kibwen on Tuesday January 12, 2016 @08:56PM (#10891837)

  > any general purpose language needs to know how to do "a 
  > bit about everything", so it would probably be just as 
  > complex as C++.
Unless C++ massively breaks backwards compatibility (which would be a death sentence for the language, IMO), new general-purpose languages will be capable of achieving an order of magnitude less complexity than C++ simply by learning from C++'s history and avoiding all of its unfortunate missteps. Rust is one such language, having studied C++ extensively.

  > If something is going to kill C++, its probably a 
  > language that scales very well to multicore.
Rust was conceived in order to write a browser engine with extreme fine-grained concurrency and parallelism, at every level, and capable of scaling from one core to as many as you can throw at it. See https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Design for a basic idea of its structure.

  > I think C++ programmers are slowly but surely moving 
  > away from C-style coding towards modern C++
This is not my experience. As far as I can tell, C++98 remains the most popular dialect of C++ used in a day-to-day capacity in industry. Even among the relatively "hip" Hacker News-ish crowd, I have seen just as many people advocating that C++ usage revert to the "C with classes" approach as I have seen people advocating modern C++.

  > [TIOBE link]
Even if you accept TIOBE as an authority on language popularity, you need only scroll down to the historical graph to see that C++ has eroded heavily over the past 15 years, whereas Java and C have more-or-less held steady. Even among the tier of languages that C++ leads now, PHP, Python, and C# have all held historical market share greater than C++ does today, which to me indicates that we are past the point in time where C++ can be said to hold a commanding position in the market. And even disregarding that it has Java and C to compete with, it would supremely difficult for C++ to regain a commanding market position now that it has to compete with new languages on multiple fronts where it formerly dominated: systems programming (Rust), server programming (Go), application programming (Swift).

So no, C++ isn't going to "die" (what language ever truly dies? COBOL still powers all the world's banks, and I've personally been paid to write RPG-LE), but I wouldn't bet on its ascendancy.

There are no comments on this comment yet.