The thing is in ruby you are already in main method so there's no need to declare main function as an entry point. The main reason that the c++ version the code is longer has some historical/performance related issues! In c++11 it could've been with smaller standard library at design but that could break the old codes! Although obviously, "Little code =! Better code". What you want to achieve is actually more important. Btw, C++ as a scripting language? at first you might think that way but truly that's a big lie :)