C/C++ facts we learned before going ahead with CLion

Listing GCC usage essentially at parity with Visual C++ on Windows (34% vs 36%) is also ridiculous.

As I answered in our blog: That’s a good observation. The point is that various data has come from various data sources, that can be influenced by many factors. When we got some data on the same topic from different sources, we were trying to get some average. Actually various data sources gives slightly different numbers with inaccuracy up to 4-7% for each of these questions. For example for platform distribution we saw 40/50/10 variant (however the order was the same for all the options), and 39/44/17 is a average across all the sources given platform distribution numbers. Compiler stat is more accurate across various resources, however we suspect that all-platforms compiler distribution was mostly measured across cross-platform projects, that means less percent for the Visual C++ compiler (and that’s the reason we include the Windows stat separately from the all platforms stat here).

Most likely because their "C++ developers by platform" statistic does not include an "other" category, while there are actually developers working on platforms than Windows, OS X, or Linux (such as Solaris, BSD, etc). Since they didn't include an "other" category but the numbers add up to 100%, they probably just left out people who didn't respond to that question; thus in fact, in their sample, the number of Windows developers is probably less than 36%.

Another thing to note is the sources of information used for these statistics, including their own user surveys. These aren't necessarily accurate for the industry as a whole, but rather represent a particular sample, which happens to include their own existing users, people on Reddit, people sharing code on GitHub, etc.

I also find the 12% fact hard to believe. IMHO lots of commercial software is still developed and runned on windows, and seing anything other than MSVC there is an exception. For games I'm thinking the situation is the same. So I would guess it alone is at least 20%.

Also the embedded SW development market is really big, and C/C++ is still dominant there. E.g. in automotive nearly all ECUs are pure C, using compilers that fall in the "others" category of this survey.

But I guess the issue could be the used sources here. E.g. embedded is in large parts a closed ecosystem with less visibility on the internet sites about programming (which are often very web-focused).

I'm guessing that it's the finance industry itself which accounts for a high Linux usage, since they mostly need C++ for server-side use.

Another surprising number was that Windows users use GCC almost as often as Visual Studio. GCC on Windows is kind of a PITA, and the VS toolchain is really pretty good. Maybe people go with GCC because they need proper C99/C11 support.

We should say that these data found out to be very accurate if to look at our C++ tools users platform and areas distribution. It matches for 100%

> useful and interesting dataset

I think the usefulness is limited by the fact that they haven't explained how they gathered this data. At first glance, the data looks to have some specific quirks (44% Linux users, overwhelmingly in the Finance industry) – you'd have to wonder it that's due to how the survey was conducted.

It does seem odd. Then again, don't underestimate the amount of people developing for embedded devices on windows - which is often done with a gcc toolchain supplied by the chip or rtos vendor.

C++11 compiler will compile C++03 code just fine, AFAIK.

C11 is not C++. That's not what JetBrains is saying, so I'm not sure what the nitpick is about.

The webpage is clearly about C/C++ ... that's the title of page ... in other words... "C Language" and "C++ Language".

Both languages were included in their surveys and market research.