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Comment by froydnj | Hacker News Reader

I don't buy that. Maybe it's true in the "reads Hacker News" monoculture (or the "comments on Hacker News" monoculture), but that sample is not representative of the wider programming world.

Apple's not going to spend several million dollars of engineering effort to create another C++ compiler if nobody's writing C++. Companies aren't going to spend money on sending representatives to C++0x standards meetings if their customers aren't using C++.

People are realizing that they don't have to program in C++ for many different areas. That doesn't mean that they're aren't still writing parts of their apps in C++. And there's a lot of existing C++ code out there that still has to be extended, debugged, and maintained.

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I don't know. My company is on any given week reviewing code for as many as 15 different applications, for companies running the gamut from web startups to Win32 desktop software vendors to embedded software vendors.

I stand by my assertion. Most people aren't writing in C/C++ anymore. Even the embedded vendors find ways to avoid it.

Fair enough. Perhaps all the C++ effort is simply a dying gasp from the collective industry.

In any event, we're talking to different sets of embedded vendors. The embedded vendors I talk to are still using C++ and so are their customers. Maybe I'm talking to the less profitable ones, though. ;)

I can't imagine how C++ standardization efforts could possibly correlate in any way with industry adoption. The two things are completely orthogonal.

C++ hasn't been eradicated, but --- even in some embedded environments --- it is no longer the go-to language (Java seems to have that honor now).

Bringing this back to Stross' point, though: ASCIIZ strings aren't more relevant to modern computer security because of C++. Obviously, C++ disfavors them (though most C++ devs I know still drop to charstars when std::string gets frustrating), but, more importantly, they have almost nothing to do with Java, C#, Python, or PHP string handling.

> I can't imagine how C++ standardization efforts could possibly correlate in any way with industry adoption. The two things are completely orthogonal.

I don't think they're orthogonal: standardization efforts don't happen until you have significant industry adoption of technology X from several vendors and they (and/or their customers) decide it'd better if their implementations could interoperate. Why do you think they're completely orthogonal?

It's possible, of course, that the C++0x (C++1x?) standardization round is taking place on the peak or the decreasing side of C++ adoption (due to the increased complexity of C++, users finding benefits to non-C++ languages, movement into areas where C++ doesn't help much, etc.). But I don't think that's the case; perhaps we're on a plateau of C++ adoption, if anything.

Nobody's arguing that C++ is a fringe language. Clearly it has huge adoption. But that has nothing to do with whether it's a popular choice for new software. Sorry, it simply isn't.

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