Sure, 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 yo

Sure, 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.