I almost wanted to include the exclaimer of "crap software preloaded by hardware vendors like HP, Lenovo, Dell, etc". Who (in the right mind) doesn't reinstall Windows and install only the "device drivers" but not the crap UI software that is of very little use anyways? The device driver is always in C and sometimes in C++. Nvidia/AMD/Intel drivers work fine without the crap "experience" or "control panel". And even if you install keep all the preloaded software, it's the first action to remove them from autostart, isn't it? Otherwise don't blame your hardware or Windows why your computer is that slow and takes ages to start...
DotNet and Java are very big in enterprise software and server software. Java is also big in open source thanks to Apache foundation (if you need a full text search engine, Lucene is still the only feature complete in town; and all the projects based around Lucene like Hadoop, Solr, etc) There was an C++ port of Lucene (CLucene) that was a lot faster and used little memory and compatible with Lucene file format. Though no native fork of Lucene keep up with the development speed of Apache Java Lucene.