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Comment by z3phyr | Hacker News Reader

A major chunk of software developers use C/C++ (including a lot of Game Developers); Although lot of people see only the tip of the iceberg. Look into your systems. Almost everything down there from your database to your compiler/interpreter/VM to your operating system, your web browser, your music player, the internals of your search engine and yes your favorite games (renderer, physics, most of the gameplay) is probably being developed and maintained in C/C++.

The reason for C++ being used is not only Performance, but also a sense reliability that the implementation will actually work.

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I like C++, but I am also quite older than the language and remember when the language was seen as unsuitable to write any of those systems you have mentioned.

Eventually it got adopted by people like myself that didn't care for the naysayers and its compilers improved to the point many think it was always like that.

Likewise others will use languages that the naysayers of today won't see as proper to write them and in ca 20 years from now, everyone will think they were always that way.

In the early 90's I posted on some game developers forum that when consoles got more powerful processors it would be possible to write games in C instead of using assembly language. Everybody told me that I was an idiot.

You are right. I see a huge potential in Rust. It seems very suitable for the C++ level domains. The only thing keeping me away from production usage today is the lack maturity with ecosystem and libraries.

Rust is kinda the Godwin's law of C++ threads these days.

C++ is huge in scientific programming. Fortran is the cliche language for science, but the vast majority of newer large-scale codes are being written in C++.

AFAIK Debian isn't very diligent about tagging packages with "implemented-in", but even so:

  dpkg -l |grep ^ii -c #Installed packages
  3608
  # packages tagged as being in c++, and installed:
  aptitude search '?tag(implemented-in::c++)' \
    |grep ^i -c
  930

I'm sure there's lots of c++ in the other 75% (or they depend on a runtime/compiler/library written in c++) -- but at any rate - one in four packages is nothing to sneeze at.

Your search query needs escaping for the pluses, otherwise it will match 'implemented-in::c' as well (aptitude's matching is weird).

Whoops, you're absolutely right. Eg:

  '?tag(implemented-in:c\+\+)'

On a different desktop right now, so can't check -- but that'll probably lower the count considerably (eg: on a different server I get 226 for "c/c++" and 19 for just "c++" ("c\+\+)").

Linux is more of a C than a C++ land, so the figure does not look unreasonable to me.

This is completely irrelevant to the question. Furthermore, most of the code was written a decade ago. Why can't I use Go, for example?

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