Firefox was written in C++, and WebKit too (coming from KDE). It could be that C++ is better fit for frameworks, while C for libraries. V8 is also C++, but lot

Firefox was written in C++, and WebKit too (coming from KDE). It could be that C++ is better fit for frameworks, while C for libraries. V8 is also C++, but lots of other successfull VM's are written in "C" I like "C" because it's more limiting, hence I won't see templates overused, or latest trick used (SFINAE). It's also easier for me to read. Also at binary level things are simpler - here is your function, and it's name, it takes this and this as parameter, and returns this and that, also follows this convetion (stdcall, pascal, fortran, etc.) With C++ my biggest pain has been name mangling. I'm not sure why this was not standartized. It's actually much better that the name of the function automatically contains what types it can take, which would've been much easier for dynamic binding, but then you have GNU, MSVC and others totally differs on how they mangle the name (and from version to version it changes a lot). Also exception handling (mingw/cygwin/msvc - there is big confusion there, and on binary compability level it's hard to combine one with another). My last show-stopper for C++ was - on this platform you can' t use this feature. For example on certain game consoles exceptions are not allowed. So you go with longjmp/setjmp, but then this would not unwind the stack and call destructors. Most of all, I got bitten by a heavily templated math library - it was much faster with optimizations than the one before, but without (debug) it was several times slower than same one before it. Why? Because it was relying on inlining everything, and back then gcc for playstation2 was not really inlining everything, even if it was forced. So every overloaded operation (matrix by matrix, or matrix by vector) was actually function call. There is another gotcha - sometimes overloaded C++ operators lose their ability to short-cut. For example overloading && and || would not longer short-cut, and many other gotchas. Most of all, I can't stand boost - it's just too huge. But I'm totally fine with C++ the simple way (whatever this is) - best example for me is ZeroMQ lib - it's C++ internally, they limit themselves to not use exceptions, and provide "C" interface by default. This makes it very easy to use from other languages - python, lua, ruby, etc.