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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

Other than 3D AAA game engines, all the C++ software that I replaced with either Java or .NET solutions has kept the customers happy and lowered the TCO of their products.

This wasn't tiny CLI that occasionally lands on HN, rather large scale desktop applications or distributed computing clusters.

Winning micro-benchmarks is not everything, which is why except for Windows with WinUI (which still remains to be seen if it can move windevs away from Forms/WPF in its current incomplete state), all OS vendors are migrating to other languages for their App development SDKs, leaving C++ and Rust only for low level OS components.

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Are those C++ ones written in pre-C++11 ?

I don't think C++ and Rust are for just low-level. I've build a lot of GUI apps and distributed ones with C++

QT is a beast.

The issue with Java is the reverse engineering. Back in 90's, The main selling point for Java was to prevent it, because at that time the bytecode was hard to understand at least. Now tools has grown and it's fairly easy to reverse engineer Java, even if one obfuscate it.

As for C++, Inline code and template code make it pain in ass.

I'm sure big companies that care about intellectual property would use C++ over Java anytime. C++ also has mature obfuscation tools that make it even more difficult.

Java has it's place. It's great language if you use in server side or isolated env (From commercial viewpoint).

Nevertheless, I've built many web apps using C++ too.

They were and are written in all sorts of C++ flavours, including past C++11.

Reverse engineering is never an issue with Java if one actually uses the right tooling, commercial AOT compilers exisst since around 2000, it is a matter of buying them.

I assume JetBrains and Google are big companies.

Google where I works at is largely a C++ shop despite Android Java.

AOT compilers exists for Java, Net, Javascript. I however doubt the user experience of those.

For example, GraalVM mentions the following,

"There is a small portion of Java features are not susceptible to ahead-of-time compilation, and will therefore miss out on the performance advantages. To be able to build a highly optimized native executable, GraalVM runs an aggressive static analysis that requires a closed-world assumption, which means that all classes and all bytecodes that are reachable at run time must be known at build time. Therefore, it is not possible to load new data that have not been available during ahead-of-time compilation."

Not everyone is Google, and since you work there you are surely aware of tooling like Ghidra and IDA.

GraalVM is not what I would pick for AOT Java projects, there are other products since 2000.

In any case, this isn't a comparisasion of language bullet points.

Just because a software product has been migrated from C++ into Java, .NET or whatever language, it doesn't mean it is a sacrilege to keep some native lib around, which is exactly where all mainstream OSes are going, with C++ being left for the bottom layers.

How many desktop GUIs is Google shipping written in pure C++?

"In 2017, the Qt Company estimated a community of about 1 million developers worldwide[18] in over 70 industries."

See list of companies using C++ QT for GUI,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_(software)

1 - Qt is not an OS SDK. Apparently you missed that part of my comment.

2 - Qt has been migrating away from pure C++, again you also missed pure from my comment, modern Qt applications are written in Qt Quick, a JavaScript dialect, with underlying components written in C++.

C++ Widgets have hardly changed since Qt 4, other than being updated to the underlying Qt infrastructure.

> How many desktop GUIs is Google shipping written in pure C++?

You mean apart from the Chrome browser?

https://developer.chrome.com/blog/migrating-to-typescript/

https://developer.chrome.com/blog/puppeteer-typescript/

https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/docs...

Pure => not mixed with anything else

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/pure?q=P...

> all the C++ software that I replaced with either Java or .NET solutions has kept the customers happy and lowered the TCO of their products.

Were your customers enterprises that made their employees use those products, or were they end user, consumer products?

In my experience, enterprises are happy to push slow, laggy, hard to use corporate tools on their employees as long as it saves them money.

The customers of the enterprises.

Many devs are too religious arguing for home team and don't embrace polyglot programming.

Just because a product is mainly written in managed language X, doesn't mean some library can't be written in something else.

C and C++ devs have forgotten the days when their beloved programs in 8 and 16 bit home computers, were a pile of inline Assembly if performance was to be anywhere of an acceptable level.

Embrace the safety and productivity of higher level languages (with AOT and JIT compilers), and let a couple of native libs be the "inline Assembly" if and only if, a profiler proves it is actually required instead of choosing a better data structure or algorithm.

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