I can’t believe I had to come down this far to see the Law of Headlines. C++ isn’t going anywhere for a long time. For all of its technical and design faults and overbearing complexity, its (yes, deceptive) compatibility with C, the most important language in the industry, even at the source level is unmatched and it’s the only language that even competes in the space that it’s in: a language with all the power of classical OOP, which is the paradigm of the industry (hated or not), with the performance of C. It has many different implementations to run on pretty much any computer you could want to run code on. Its compilers are industrial strength and best-in-class and it has wide tooling support. There is a broad talent pool to draw from for hiring.Rust is the only thing that even looks close to a competitor, but it still has a long road before it’s viably a replacement, and its lack of OOP and strict ownership rules may prove to be too foreign for the vast majority of programmers who are used to slinging pointers around and OOP design patterns, not to mention the cozy C syntax.
Even if C++’s technical merits are lacking, it won a cultural victory by catering to both the hegemony of OOP and C.
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