bearophile wrote:
Walter Bright:
bearophile wrote:
I think C++ is almost a niche language at Google.
Every chance I get, I ask programmers what languages their
companies use. In the last 5 years, I've seen a steady shrinking of
the amount of C++ in use. Java and C# increasingly dominate.
Today C# is probably the best general-purpose language+IDE. It has
some problems, but they are usually tolerable. Its main problem is to
be a proprietary language. C# gives almost the freedom of C++ (and a
lot of more freedom than Java), while being "safe" and allowing for
good IDEs. Programming in C# is faster, you avoid many bugs and
corner cases present in C++ and the language is designed to be not
error prone. Probably C# is the language closest to D. The ecological
niche for D is shrinking, programmers like VMs with lot of libraries,
good IDE and good amount of modules available. I like D, but I don't
know if all the work spent on creating D is somewhat wasted effort.
My friends don't seem interested in a "better C++"...
An opposing trend is that single processor speed is plateau-ing, at
least for the time being. This means two things. One, parallelism is
becoming increasingly important. Second, efficient languages will be
sought after because new applications will always put more demands on
processing speed. Until recently, it was the case that processing speed
increased together with new software releases (leading to the bloatware
we know), but that needs to change now.
So I see the niche for D growing for the time being.
Andrei
