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Comment by yen223 | Hacker News Reader

To confirm a theory that I had [0], I once tried to track what languages the software I actually use is written in. I basically arrived at the same conclusion as OP - almost everything I use is written in C++. From the browser, to my favourite games, to even the backends of a lot of websites I use frequently, it's pretty much all C++ with other languages sprinkled in. This, mind you, is not even counting the fact that most JVM implementations and Node interpreters are also written in C++.

If I ever wanted to learn a new language, C++ would be it.

[0] The theory I had was that almost none of the software I use is written in Haskell. Which was true by a long shot.

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This, mind you, is not even counting the fact that most JVM implementations and Node interpreters are also written in C++.

Moreover every major C compiler (GCC/Clang/MSVC/etc) is written in C++. So any C projects depending on those compilers is indirectly depending on C++, e.g. Linux. Not to mention the success of LLVM among other languages.

I think this ultimately just reflects on a certain generation of software that we're still using - a 1990's, Unix-ish, graphics-oriented, Internet-capable stack.

I don't think we're staying there, either. C++ is very long in the tooth. Most people looking for a C++-like thing now gravitate towards Rust(with a little bit of deviation for stuff in roughly the same ballpark like Nim, D, and sometimes Zig). And many of the old projects are looking towards migrating to new languages as well. It's just a matter of the critical masses shifting.

Nothing is forever but this totally discounts the primacy of C++ across tech stacks. Rust and any other language leveraging LLVM is depending on a healthy C++ ecosystem. Anything to do with GPGPU is aggressively C++ based, the entire HPC segment is pivoting hard towards C++ (Kokkos, SYCL), and it’s likely orders of magnitude easier to rewrite the entire Linux kernel in Rust than it would be to rewrite chromium in Rust.

The only distinctively Haskell software I use is shellcheck. koalaman did say in an interview that he had slight regrets it was in Haskell since it made it difficult to collaborate / receive contributions.

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