C++ has been stagnated for many years, and many developers were confident that the language would have the same destiny as Cobol, Fortran, and VB6. Furthermore, No new projects would be developed with it and C++ developers would do just the maintenance of existing projects, which makes it a legacy language. On the contrary and against all odds, C++ is reborned from its ashes and the new standards are importantly changing how the language is used.
Here are some indicators prove that C++ is not a legacy anymore.
- Standardization community is very active: After many years of C++ standardization stagnation, the amazing story of modernizing it has just began. The standardization committee has now a mature process to deliver periodically new features and the known compilers are very reactive to implement them. Many new features are planned for C++17 and others will come in the next few years. Why introducing new features if the language will not be used in new projects? Investing in the new standards is a proof that many major software actors are confident that c++ will have a big added value in the next future projects.
- Big companies still use C++ in their new projects: Companies like Google, Microsoft or Facebook still use it in many of their projects, and new C++ frameworks and libraries are created by this language. Microsoft made C++ the first citizen language for its new WinRT api; Google used it to develop Chrome, Chromium OS, and many other projects; Facebook chose to invest in C++, many of their libraries are using the new standards like the Folly library.
- New C++ projects are added each day to GitHub : Many new projects using C++11 are created during the last two years and hosted in GitHub. To name a few of these projects area: games, financial libraries, processing libraries (Image, audio and scientific software), parsers and compilers, and utilities libraries…
- Google search: Searching for C++ in the last 24h gave 21 result pages and 18 pages for C# which proves that a buzz still exist around C++ and its new features.
- Community interest: C++ still popular in community websites like Stackoverflow, reddit , codeproject and forums.
- Events: After the renaissance of C++, Many events and conferences are organized. Indeed, each month many events are planned all around the world, we can find some of them on CppCon and MeetingCpp.
To summarize, C++ is not a legacy anymore: it was modernized and adapted to make its use easier than before. Many new features will come in the future which will make it more attractive than other languages.