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Comment by wslh | Hacker News Reader

Great article more about different approaches to building software that languages themselves.

My two cents: it is improbable that C++ will be ever replaced because it is a mastodon as a programming language: super complex, where complex includes complexity as difficulties and also its vastness. This doesn't mean that it will increase its usage since it is common nowadays to use specific programming languages (e.g. Python) for specific purposes and rely on C++ and others for very specific areas. Personally, I really liked SWIG [1] as a wrapper and interface generator. Don't know how much it is used today.

Other experience but similar conclusion than the article.

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C++ is kind of a “language of last resort” type thing where you use it if there isn’t another good option for what you want to do. Eg. Most desktop development was done in C++, but now C# and newer languages have killed off C++ for most desktop apps. So C++ is still widely used in embedded/performance critical use cases, but Rust will replace a lot of it over the long term.

New C++ projects are started every day. And billions of lines of C/C++ runs the world. So C/C++ will be around and used heavily for a very long time. Probably way beyond the retirement age of anybody reading this.

Is a language can be too big to fall? That's an interesting question tbh.

Good question. My personal take is that C++ makes many developers happy, comfortable, and you can develop in C++ using different approaches, that is enough. There is no programming language for all and I think this is why we have a lot of them now and even DSLs.

I consider myself far from what is considered professional C++ knowledge, but for cryptography I always relied on Crypto++ [1] and that made me decide for the use of C++, at least partially. I think we can apply the same thinking for JavaScript or TypeScript, personally I don't like too much those programming languages but if I need to write a RESTful backend I go that route because they have good modules for that or sometimes I decide for Python.

[1] https://www.cryptopp.com/

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