800,000+ developers seems like an awful lot. I work mostly on the web - do I just not move in the right circles to meet these Qt developers?
In fact, it is my opinion that Qt is the one thing that keeps C++ relevant these days (http://weblog.jeroen.ws/blog/2012/11/19/how-relevant-is-c-pl...).
For anything safety critical, C in particular still has a vice-like stranglehold in many industries (e.g. automobile)
Which is kind of ironic, given its well known foot-shooting abilities.
The Phusion Passenger application server is in C++.
Node.js is in C++.
I've always thought that myself. It would be interesting if there were some statistics on that.
Still, writing about Dropbox or Facebook or Stripe or whatever is now hot is way more interesting for the journalists. However, there's no doubt that the guy who wrote nginx or the Unity team (the game engine, not the Ubuntu GUI) made a hell of an impact on the industry, too. It's just that it takes more technical expertise to actually appreciate what these guys have done. That's the reason why most of the people know Steve Wozniak (if at all) as "that guy who worked for Jobs." Not that Facebook or Dropbox or Stripe or Jobs don't deserve the praise, it's just that they've built their empires on technology that also does.
I see the desktop applications being swallowed up by C# at the moment.
In the past, I wrote a server app that was supposed to be cross-platform (Windows, Linux, Embedded Linux and eventually OSX). I chose to write it in C++ & Qt. That ended up being a bad decision because of the bloat. Since we needed the app to be able to run on embedded systems we couldn't use Qt. (We eventually wanted to be able to run on VxWorks as well). So, the size of the binary was too large. Eventually, I rewrote the app in ANSI C and saved a huge amount in the size of the static binary IIRC ~4MB (Warning, I don't remember exactly). The #ifdef code for each platform was one .c file for each OS with just a few functions on how to start/stop the service etc...
I should take another look at it.
But in general it's pretty good. There was a GSOC project this year to implement a DirectX backend to the Windows drawing system instead of GDI but I don't know how well that has got on. They overhauled the drawing system to using native drawing contexts on whichever platform you're running, so you can do aliasing etc.
It's worth a look I think, as it is quite easy to write something usable in it very quickly. There is no database support anymore though - wxODBC died a death.
Just about any big game studio uses P4 these days. I haven't seen one that doesn't.
I'm currently having to use Accurev in an enterprise environment, but I haven't run into anything that Accurev offers that can't be accomplished with git in a better and faster way. But then again, that's just my opinion :-)
([1] Predictably someone will probably want to respond to this with some link that shows a complicated and non-intuitive way in which you can get git to be halfway reasonable with handling binary files, though this will just prove my point more than disprove it, when compared to P4 which just handles binary files great out of the box with no thinking or planning required).
I'm not trying to start a flame war, I'm seriously curious.
There are various git methodologies and projects (eg. git-annex) aimed at working around this but by default git just wasn't designed to deal with big repos full of big files.
It seems like 2 of the main reasons Perforce works better with binary files is that when you sync, you only get the version you're requesting, thus resulting in faster downloads and there's an option to disable compression.
According to their website: http://www.perforce.com/perforce/doc.current/manuals/p4guide... Binary files are stored compressed as well. (I assume that there's an option to disable this)
Thanks for the response and information.
http://developer.blackberry.com/native/documentation/core/po...
https://www.openwebosproject.org/docs/architecture
plus many specialized niche applications that don't get a lot of press.
Whether you WANT to write a web app in C++ is an entirely different matter, of course.
That said, I wrote the backend to provide HTML5 video over websockets using Qt for my company.
I've used in software for multiplatform oil and gas data analysis and visualisation. I've left the company many years ago, but they still use it heavily.
I've used it mainly on embedded platforms for UI.
(Having said that, it was a simple concept and easy to grasp)