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There are decades and decades of code written in cobol that run the modern banking system. Multiply that code base size by like, 78.3, and you’re possibly in t

by dgfitz 2y ago

There are decades and decades of code written in cobol that run the modern banking system. Multiply that code base size by like, 78.3, and you’re possibly in the same galaxy as the all the c++ codebases out there that will be maintained for the next 50 years. Rust may eat the lunch of c++ moving forward, the language will never go away.

larodi 2y ago
Abso-fkn-lutely! Stable computing protocols of all sorts don’t go away overnight and that is something everyone in IT should absolutely get used to. I expect C/C++ to live long beyond 2050.
DowsingSpoon 2y ago
>the language will never go away Just like COBOL! Seriously, _just like COBOL_. The language will fade in importance over time. C++ will be relegated to increasingly narrow niches. It will eventually only be found in "legacy" systems that no one wants to spend to rewrite. No one young will bother at all to learn C++ at all. Then, in a few decades, they'll be pulling folks like you and me out of retirement to maintain old systems for big bucks.
- timewizard 2y ago
  I doubt this analysis. The base of computing where C++ is used is exponentially larger than the base where COBOL was used. In particular the compilers we currently use are written in it.
  - DowsingSpoon 2y ago
    You definitely make a good point. My thought was that large legacy projects would slowly migrate to a different language. The news of the recent introduction of Rust in Linux has me optimistic something similar will eventually happen in other places too. (not necessarily with Rust, specifically) The keyword here is Eventually. I’m thinking this is years away for GCC and LLVM. If the new language has good interop with the old then this doesn’t have to be painful either. A while back, I was working on a large Objective-C code base which was slowly moving to Swift. We quickly got to a point where new code was written in Swift by default. In only a couple of years, we had a code base which used Objective-C pretty much only in the dark corners where code churns slowly.

by dgfitz 2y ago

larodi 2y ago

Abso-fkn-lutely! Stable computing protocols of all sorts don’t go away overnight and that is something everyone in IT should absolutely get used to. I expect C/C++ to live long beyond 2050.

DowsingSpoon 2y ago

>the language will never go away Just like COBOL! Seriously, _just like COBOL_. The language will fade in importance over time. C++ will be relegated to increasingly narrow niches. It will eventually only be found in "legacy" systems that no one wants to spend to rewrite. No one young will bother at all to learn C++ at all. Then, in a few decades, they'll be pulling folks like you and me out of retirement to maintain old systems for big bucks.

timewizard 2y ago
I doubt this analysis. The base of computing where C++ is used is exponentially larger than the base where COBOL was used. In particular the compilers we currently use are written in it.
- DowsingSpoon 2y ago
  You definitely make a good point. My thought was that large legacy projects would slowly migrate to a different language. The news of the recent introduction of Rust in Linux has me optimistic something similar will eventually happen in other places too. (not necessarily with Rust, specifically) The keyword here is Eventually. I’m thinking this is years away for GCC and LLVM. If the new language has good interop with the old then this doesn’t have to be painful either. A while back, I was working on a large Objective-C code base which was slowly moving to Swift. We quickly got to a point where new code was written in Swift by default. In only a couple of years, we had a code base which used Objective-C pretty much only in the dark corners where code churns slowly.