3 ms·
There are many "real competitors" to C++. The biggest one is C. Many things were written in C in recent years: the Postgres database, networkmanager, pulseaud
by colin_mccabe 13y ago
There are many "real competitors" to C++. The biggest one is C. Many things were written in C in recent years: the Postgres database, networkmanager, pulseaudio, the Linux, BSD, and Mach kernels, zeroMQ, sshd, Xfce, Gnome 2 and 3, the list goes on and on. You may not like it, but people chose to write these things in C when C++ was available. Similarly, Apple chose to base most of MacOS on another non-memory-safe, (usually) non-garbage collected systems programming language: Objective-C. We can debate the merits of these choices, but to deny that they exist is just prima facie incorrect.
- vinkelhake 13y agoSure, there are many competitors to C++ and that's not something that I'm contending. What I said was that there aren't any real competitors in its niche. If you want more powerful abstraction features, while preserving C-level performance, there aren't many real options. If you don't want or need those things, then C is a perfectly good choice. There are many other languages that raise the abstraction level, but most do it at a performance cost. As for Objective-C, I'm fully convinced that it would be an obscure niche language today if it hadn't been for Apple basing OS X on NeXTSTEP. I don't see it as a competitor to C++ unless you're actually working in the Apple ecosystem.