2011.07.22 - this is the (C++) world we live in

during my studies Java and later on .NET with its C# were presented as the languages of the future. no more dangling pointers, no more memory leaks, no more unhandled errors, and more… after 10 years of C# and 16 years of Java we can look back and think about it. how does current market look like? looks like C and C++ are doing fine. how can that be?

there are good reasons for this, actually. current market are heading two opposite directions at the same time. one is high performance computing (clusters, grids, clouds…). second is broad market of small and/or mobile devices (smart phones, home routers, mp3 players…). in the first case computing power is critical and it DOES cost, so usually we cannot effort extra abstractions layers that “waste” it. in the second case we have limited battery power (what's good cell phone running 3h before it needs to be recharged?) and/or hardware cost (imagine home-router with 4 LAN ports costing 1000 Euro, because it requires hardware that will be fast enough to handle interpreted code). there are of course desktop applications as well. a lot of home-software can effort to be computationally and memory inefficient, taking into account power of modern home hardware and simple logic of many applications. but wait - have you heard about any commonly used operating system written in “high-level” language with garbage collector and/or VM? or maybe top-list 3D-shooter? so even here we're back to native code. and when it comes to native code there are actually two real-world choices: C and C++…

looks like this is the C++ world we live in

blog/2011/07/22/1.txt · Last modified: 2021/06/15 20:09 by 127.0.0.1
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