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Comment by SwellJoe | Hacker News Reader

"I don't know if C++ will still be relevant in a few years."

The standards body members are still fighting about whether memory safety is important enough to change the language for, so, I would guess the answer is "no".

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Yeah that was abundantly clear when Bjarne Stroustrup published "A call to action: Think seriously about “safety”; then do something sensible about it"[0] as a reaction to NSA's recommendation to no longer use C/C++.

[0] https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2023/p27...

C++ will outlive you.

Well, sure, but that doesn't mean it's not in a decline that is very unlikely to reverse course. Fewer people this year are starting new projects in C++ than last year, and fewer people than that will be starting new projects in C++ next year. And, as the models get really good at porting and the cost (both in terms of tokens and human supervision) comes down, there will be an avalanche of ports from less safe languages to safer languages.

This year, maybe next, maybe a year or two after that, is probably the most C++ lines of code in production use there will ever be. Why would one choose C++ for new projects at this point? There are niches where Rust is still uncomfortable or just doesn't have the support, but not for much longer. Models are very good at Rust and good at porting to Rust. And, Rust is a good language for models because it is so strict...it helps keep them in line.

> Fewer people this year are starting new projects in C++ than last year, and fewer people than that will be starting new projects in C++ next year.

Let's put [Citation needed] on this and let's assume that your personal opinion bubble of developers doesn't really represent the combined worlds software industry. Mind actually proving that there's a significant decline of use of C++ outside the hype crowd?

> Why would one choose C++ for new projects at this point?

Why indeed would you choose a language supported on every running platform on this world with a massive library of supported dependencies and mature compilers developed by stable teams.

(I'd probably also personally choose Rust for new projects, but let's make this a practice in "not everyone is like me" empathy.)

Guess which compiler backends many of those languages are using, because the authors don't want to invest into bootstraping?

Where did I say all C++ code will immediately disappear?

"Well, sure, but that doesn't mean it's not in a decline that is very unlikely to reverse course."

Which taken to the logical conclusion will mean its disappearance.

Except there are plenty of industry standards that only acknowledge C and C++, and safer languages that depend on them for their own compilers, including mighty Rust.

COBOL has been in decline for almost the entirety of my time on this earth. And, yet....

There are billions of lines of C++ code in production use. That doesn't disappear overnight, and I've never said it would or even suggested it would disappear overnight. But, the relevance of C++ for the average developer seems likely to never be higher than is it today, and the amount of code written in C++ vs. safer languages, seems likely to decline.

You're arguing with a different assertion than the one I've made.

It may decline, yet until those safer languages get fully bootstraped, someone will keep writing fresh C++ to keep those compilers and language runtimes going.

COBOL latest ISO version is from 2023, by the way.

Of course. So will Cobol.

Depends, who is going to rewrite LLVM in Rust, while expecting the same level of contributions LLVM enjoys nowadays?

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