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In Defense of C++

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185 points todsacerdoti | 1 comments | 16 Sep 25 19:40 UTC | HN request time: 0.201s | source
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gmueckl ◴[16 Sep 25 21:29 UTC] No.45268341[source]▶
C++ will always stay relevant. Software has eaten the world. That transition is almost complete now. The languages that were around when it happened will stay deeply embedded in our fundamental tech stacks for another couple decades at least, if not centuries. And C and C++ are the lion's share of that.

COBOL sticks around 66 years after its first release. Fortran is 68 years old and is still enormously relevant. Much, much more software was written in newer languages and has become so complex that replacements have become practically impossible (Fuchsia hasn't replaces Linux in Google products, wayland isn't ready to replace X11 etc)

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1. briHass ◴[17 Sep 25 02:55 UTC] No.45271079[source]▶
Especially the 'backend' languages that do all the heavy lifting for domain-specific software. Just in my vertical of choice, financial software, there are literally billions of lines of Java and .NET code powering critical systems. The code is the documentation, and there's little appetite to rewrite all that at enormous cost and risk.

Perhaps AI will get reliable enough to pour through these double-digit million LOC codebases and convert them flawlessly, but that looks like it's decades off at this point.