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Are C and C++ Losing Ground?
Pickens writes "Dr. Dobbs has an interesting interview with Paul Jansen, the managing director of TIOBE Software, about the Programming Community Index, which measures the popularity of programming languages by monitoring their web presence. Since the TIOBE index has been published now for more than 6 years, it gives an interesting picture about trends in the usage of programming languages. Jansen says not much has affected the top ten programming languages in the last five years, with only Python entering the top 10 (replacing COBOL), but C and C++ are definitely losing ground. 'Languages without automated garbage collection are getting out of fashion,' says Jansen. 'The chance of running into all kinds of memory problems is gradually outweighing the performance penalty you have to pay for garbage collection.'"
But does Netcraft confirm it?
C/C++ will always be there. Period. Just look at all of the C/C++ projects on SourceForge. New languages will come and go, but C/C++ are just too stable to go so quickly.
Need an automatic screenshot taker? Try here.
But did anyone else find Visual Basic rising two spots to #3 past PHP & C++ to be a sure sign of the apocalypse? (Visual) Basic 11.699% +3.42% A Could someone reassure me that's a mistake before I go home to sit down with a bottle of Jack Daniels and a revolver with a single bullet in it?
My work here is dung.
I haven't written a line of code in C or C++ since I started with C# - C/C++ syntax with no tracking of memory (I detest tracking memory!!) except in the more obscure situations. Both .NET and Mono allow for C#, so you're not stuck on one platform.
I know I am gonna get flamed for this, but they said web programming, like its the only game out there. Sure its not web 2.0 friendly, and sure most web script kiddies don't use it...mainly because it don't hold their hand, but its far from dead when your are needing to squeeze every last ounce of power out of your hardware, or even that other 25-30% of it.
I develop desktop application software. Right now I wouldn't think about using anything else but C++.
For image processing (film/video), real-time audio or any serious signal processing, the overhead of anything but C/C++ is killer. It'll be news when Adobe After Effects or Autodesk Flame is rewritten in python.
Besides, measuring the popularity of a language by the size of its web presence is the worst kind of fallacious reasoning.
C and C++ are entrenched, but it was never their stability which caused it. Computer languages are theoretical; one valid language is just as 'stable' as another. The real issue of stability lies in the implementation, and that is language-independent.
Anyway, C is going to stick around because it is the most superb assembly language developed by man. C++ will of course stay around as well, but by modern standards it fails as a "high-level" language. The ceiling got a lot higher in the intervening 20 years; other languages reach much higher in a very useful way. I'd be happy to see less C++.
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
I could actually see C++ slowly going away over the next decade as it is replaced by other languages that fill the same needs but better. C on the other hand is probably going to be around for a long, long time.
Measuring by internet web pages mentioning it? Can you say, "worthless statistic," kids? I write code that controls hardware. You bet it's C++. I write code that's IN the hardware. An interpreted language? Are you out of your damn mind? Do I blog about it? Don't be absurd. Am I generating "web presence" for it? Only on slashdot. Go away useless statistic.
I consider a proper coder to be anyone who can write a proper flowchart and the pseudo-code/logic for their target application. It has nothing to do with the language they finally use to implement.
That being said, I agree with you otherwise. The first thing I thought of when I read the summary was 'lazy coders' when garbage collection was cited as a driving factor. That's the sad fact; many of the kids being cranked out of schools today can't code their way out of a paper bag without a compiler/interpreter that does most of the dirty work for them.
Yeah I know. Get off my lawn.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Coming from someone who can't handle the concept of a contraction, it doesn't carry the weight you think it does.
What I love about such studies is that they can confirm any theory you want.
Truth remains that every particular market has requirements which dictate selection of languages.
I doubt that telecom industry (as it is right now) would ever get over C or C++. Just like kernel or system libraries in anything else but C.
If you look at rise of Web - and pleiades of supporting it languages - then both C/C++ are out of question of course. Though again I can hardly imaging Apache or MySQL or PHP being written in anything else but C or C++.
Market for system and telecom programming is definitely shrinking - and consequently their languages. Other markets are now blooming - and their languages are becoming more popular.
My point is that the languages are complementing - they are not competing. After all you have to write hardware, firmware and OS first. Only then your beloved automated garbage collection has possibility to kicks in.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
those who can code in binary and those who cant code.
OK, kidding aside.
There are those who write code so that a person can do something on a computer. In which case the users are comparatively slow and the high level languages give you a distinct advantage in development.
Then there are those who write code to make the computer do something, in which case the low level languages give you the ability to more effectively optimize how the computer interacts with itself, this is where languages like C, C++ really come into their own.
In the early days of computing it was all about the later, now its much more about the former, but the later will never go away. So the decrease is reasonable and IMHO does not represent a failing of the language, just a shift in the way computers are being used. I will be very surprised if the high level languages ever get widespread acceptance in the areas that require computational efficiency, ala computational physics, protein folding, etc.
-- The morphemes of your disquisition are ascertainable, but they have eschewed an ambit of transpicuous exposition.
GC is available for C++, but IMHO inappropriate. One of the great advantages of C++ is that the construction/destruction mechanism, along with automatic variables, gives you absolute control of the lifetime of every single resource. Whereas a garbage collected language like Java gives you absolutely no control over when (if ever) an object is destructed. I think it is a little wacky to give up this total control of object lifetimes in return for such a puny benefit, a benefit which could easily be achieved through C++ resource management techniques like RAII.
And anyway, garbage collection is irrelevant if you never "new" anything in the first place.
Fortran has been dead for ages but we still use it everyday on a variety of architectures. I know we're not the only ones. Many scientists still use it.
Yes, but on the bright side, they lose ground about 1.5x faster than Java in most applications.
We have certainly replaced C/C++ with Python wherever we can. This is about 90% of our software. Except where C is absolutely needed (which is mostly just in our kernel/device driver stuff), the 10x faster Python development and far easier code maintenance just outweighs everything else. That the Python is much less prone to crashing for programs beyond tiny one-offs is another big positive (yes, yes, if you write perfect C/C++ and don't use glib you'll never crash either, but in practice this never happens).
In practice the speed difference doesn't matter for almost every application we've run into - we have a high speed network load tester in Python, which sounds ridiculous, but it works and it makes it insanely easier to add new tests or behaviors. If we ever hit a bottleneck, we just write a small C extension module and call that from the Python.
I'm saying Python here, but insert your higher level language of choice.
I wouldn't say C or C++ is losing ground. They both continue to serve well in the niches they established.
Meanwhile, other segments of the pie are expanding, and few of these new applications are coded in C or C++. Does that mean C and C++ are losing ground?
There is no language out there that serves as a better C than C, or a better C++ than C++. The people who carp about C++ reject the C++ agenda, which is not to achieve supreme enlightenment, but to cope with any ugly reality you throw at it, across any scale of implementation.
For those who wish to gaze toward enlightenment, there is always Java. Enlightenment is on the other side of a thick, protective window, but my isn't the view pretty? I've yet to encounter an "enlightened" language that offers a doorway rather than a window seat. I would be first in line if the hatch ever opened.
The problem with C/C++ has long been that the number of programming projects far exceeds the number of people who have the particular aptitudes that C/C++ demand: those of us who don't need (or wish) to be protected from ourselves (or the guy programming next to us).
It's not economically practical to force programmers who don't have that temperament to begin with to fight a losing battle with self-imposed coding invariants. I'm glad these people have other language choices where they can thrive within the scope of their particular gifts. I don't feel my role is diminished by their successes.
For those of us who have gone to the trouble to cultivate hardcore program correctness skills, none of the supposed problems in the design of C or C++ are progress limiting factors, not within the zone of applications that demand a hardcore attitude toward program correctness.
It's the natural order of things that hardcore niches are soon vacated by those unsuited to thrive there, leaving behind a critical core of people who specialize in deep-down nastiness.
For example, it's not just anyone who maintains a root DNS server. I can say with some assurance that the person who does so did not earn his (or her) grey hairs by worrying about whether the implementation language supported automatic GC.
Let's take a metaphor from the security sector. Ten years ago, a perimeter firewall was considered a good security measure. This measure alone eliminated 99% of TCP/IP based remote exploits.
These days, most exploits are tunneled through http, or maybe I'm behind the times, and the true threat is now regarded to be some protocol tunneled within http.
Then some genius comes along and says "in the security sector, TCP/IP defenses are losing ground". Quoi? Actually, no one is out there dismantling their TCP/IP based perimeter firewall. It's continuing to do the same essential job as ever.
It's only the bandwagon that has picked up and moved camp. Yes, garbage collection and deep packet inspection are now all the rage. So it goes.
Why not go around saying that sexual reproduction is all the rage these days? Would that imply we could eliminate all the organisms that reproduce asexually, and the earth's ecology would continue to function? Hardly.
These new languages are soaking up much of the new code burden because these language are freed from having to cope with the nastiness at the extremes (small and large) that C/C++ have already taken care of.
I would almost say that defines a success criteria for a programming language: if it removes enough nastiness from the application space, that the next language that comes along is free to function on a higher plane of convenience. C/C++ have both earned their stripes. Which of these new languages will achieve as much?
Hi,
Yes, some things need to be done in assembly or C in order to `stay competetive' or even just to remain within the realm of the possible. How much that is depends on your application and your platform.
So, systems programmers, you need not worry, your skills are always going to be needed for something.
But let's be honest here, 80% of the applications you can code entirely in Haskell or Prolog or Python or whatever fancy high-level language you may personally have come to love. And of the remaining 20%, you can usually still code 80% of the application in your favourite language and optimise the core 20% in C. (After profiling. Let me repeat that, AFTER profiling.)
Will it run faster and in less memory if you do it all in C? If you do it properly, sure. But that's not the question to ask. If you work commercially, ask for `what will be most profitable in the long run, while remaining ethical'. If you work free software projects, ask for `what will benefit people the most'.
Don't confuse the above questions with `what will satisfy my C(++) hacker ego the most'. And remember that it's not just about getting the code working and making it fast, it's about making the code robust; and in many cases it's also about making the code readable for whoever will maintain it after you.
Apologies for this rant; feel free to mod it down if you so desire, but you, dear fellow programmers, have had it coming for quite a while, as did I.
FORTRAN, Lisp, and Cobol have all lost ground. BASIC and Pascal used to be the big dogs instead of also-rans, and if Ada ever had any ground in the first place, it lost that.
Even Perl isn't as popular as it used to be, now that other languages have started to fill its niche.
Times change, and it should be unsurprising that the dominant programming languages change along with it. Some day, Java, PHP, Visual Basic, Python, and Ruby will all be obsolescent as well. Thirty years ago, computers were vastly different than they are now. In another thirty years, there will have been another quantum leap (intended) in computing. Why should the languages we program them with remain the same?
Who's going to bother listening to my "back in my day, we programmed uphill in the snow both ways" stories when I don't even bother to use a monospaced font!
And before I started up my 80x25 terminal window, I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time.
Yeah. Much better.
I wouldn't be so sure.
It's just slightly higher level. A C compiler outputs assembly code - that's the whole point of a C compiler. Think of C as the worlds greatest macro processor for assembly.
That's why most compilers have some sort of ASM pragma - so you can inject your assembly into the code if you feel the compiler is doing a poor job of it.
That's also why you'll never find a faster language. And that's why it'll never go away.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
That says nothing about those languages. All that says anything about is your job.
I write drivers, so I could make the opposite statement. Doesn't say anything about the relative merits of one language versus another though. All it says is that I'm in an environment where C makes more sense.
In summary: A hammer is best when your problem is a nail, and a screwdriver is best when your problem is a screw.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
The day the linux kernel is coded in anything other than C, is the day i after i install duke nukem forever on hurd.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
In the work I do--scientific calculations with a lot of fast numerics, , python + fortran seems like nirvana, as each overcomes the shortcomings of the other. One could just as well use C except the efficient numeric libs and memory layout give fortran an edge.
This of course is not the match made in heaven for everyone but numerical scientists should look hard.
What's so good?
Utility:
Well there's a strong base of numeric libraries in Python that are fortran array freindly so there's a good base to grow off of.
Second F2PY, which creates python modules out of fortran subs works so well it's almost transparent and painless. Even cooler is that because fortran compiles are ludicrously fast compared to C++, you can generate fortran code in the python compiler at run time and compile it one the fly for creating modules optimized to your problem.
Given you are wrapping in python, the availability of groovy C++ libs is not really very enticing at all given the pain you will pay for having to write the whole program in C++.
Practical:
Fortran as a stand alone language kinda blows for versatility and modern program architectures. But if all you are doing is writing a function then it's a sweet language because it's language syntax is so tight that it's harder to make a syntax error that compiles, and hard to logic errors seem to be less evasive than in C. (e.g. using i++ instead of ++i or doing I=4 instead of i==4 are not possible in fortran's limited syntax).
Thus you write functions and let python deal with all the memory management, human interface, file management, command line arg parsing and all the messy bits that end up being a lot bigger than the function where the program spends all it's time.
Fortran is also very optimization friendly since things like matrix multiplies and out-of-order loops are part of the core language.
This is debatable but I find that fortran seems to have a more logical memory order in 2-d arrays. Namely if you take a sub-array you get elements that are consecutive in memory and thus for most microprocessors will all get pulled into the cache on the same page. Slices of C-arrays have consecutive elements spaced by the row width apart in memory. One can of course find cases where one is preferred over another.
I do however which python had some way of optionally typing variables that was less cumbersome and slow than decorators or explicit run-time type checking. I virtually never write python that takes advantage of introspection or dynamic typing so the ability not to have some protection--optionally and just to debug--by type checking is annoying.
But If I were starting from scratch and did not have a compelling need for all those wonderful fortran numeric libs, I think the optimal choice in the future is going to be
Java+ Groovy.
basically you learn one syntax and get the best of both interpreted and compiled languages. Develop it in groovy then migrate the slow bits to JAVA. import all the great JAVA libs.
And since it's nearly the same syntax it's easy to read.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Programs which use STL containers instead of manual memory management are "trivial?" This is news to me.
Avoiding the use of "new" is not the same as avoiding dynamic allocation. You simply let the containers handle it for you. Yes, there are pointers flying around, but they are out of sight, and managed by code that actually does things properly for you.
I'd _like_ to stop using C++, frankly, but I don't seem to have a choice. A lot of my work depends on real-time capability, the kind of speed that is still only really possible on natively compiled languages that don't do dynamic typing.
I don't even mean hardcore real-time mechanical nano-second control of knife-wielding deathbots, just simple, This Must Run As Fast or Faster Than The Rate At Which It Will Be Converted To Analog. Python and Java still don't replace C in this area. (Mainly audio, video, and high-speed mechanical control.) And when it gets complex and you need to get into object oriented models to simplify the programming, there is unfortunately no real alternative other than C++. Combine this with that fact that there are a bunch of great libraries out there written in C++ that would be very difficult to replace, and you're stuck with it.
(I sort of oscillate between liking C++ and hating it, but I'm preferring straight C more and more these days. But like I said, I don't always have the luxury of choice, depending on what libraries I need to use.)
All these other languages mentioned (Java, Python, Ruby, PHP, Perl, etc) do not compile to native code, and all do dynamic memory management. Hell, that's exactly what makes them *good*. But unfortunately they're not so good for real-time tasks.
For real-time, you need deterministic memory management, and native speed. I've been looking at some other languages that compile to native code these days, like D, or Vala, but I haven't really decided yet whether I can start using them on serious projects.
I'd really like to learn more about functional programming in this area, too, but there seem to be very few functional languages that are designed for real-time. FAUST is one, but it's only for audio.
Anyone know any other good natively-compiled languages that actually have well-implemented modern features?
I wish it were possible to have a compiled version of Python, for example, but there are many dynamic features it depends on. (Some stuff could be done in Pyrex, which is a pretty cool little project, but so far I've only used it to make bindings to C libraries.)
The current generation of managed code VMs clearly have some benefits. But but they fall far short on some of the key properties that make C and C++ so powerful. Even if I grant you that the JVM and
C and C++ are the only game in town for getting the best performance and a small memory footprint and the ability to have the lowest possible latency.
.NET communities, because they have empirically demonstrated that they culturally have no regard for small memory footprint, low overhead, short startup time, etc. They just don't consider huge memory footprint or ridiculous startup times a problem. This is not to ment
That said, I think that C and C++ are becoming harder to justify when you consider the havoc that memory errors can wreak. It's highly embarrassing to vendors and damaging to their customers when a buffer overflow exploit is discovered. malloc and free, even when used correctly, can still have some forgotten downsides like the memory fragmentation that was discovered in Firefox 2, and took some very smart people a lot of work to address.
What I would like to see is a language that gives the benefits of C and C++ (extremely fast, extremely small memory footprint, and no GC pauses) but that is also immune to C and C++'s weaknesses (memory corruption, memory leaks, memory fragmentation). Yep, I pretty much want to have my cake and eat it too. Why do I think this is possible? I think that the future is to have a fully concurrent, compacting GC. Everyone's telling us we're going to have more cores than we know what to do with soon, right? Well why not use all those extra cores to do GC in the background? Even if it's more expensive on the whole, we barely know what to do with all those extra cores as it is. With this strategy, you could get the performance guarantees and low overhead of C and C++ (on the real, non-GC thread, that is) without having to give up GC or suffer from memory fragmentation.
I'm also not willing to give up the option of dropping to C or C++ (or even assembly language) when it's justified. Mention JNI in a room of Java people and observe them reel in horror -- it's culturally shunned to deviate from "100% pure Java." Maybe this is a good value when you're on a big team of people writing a web app, but for systems and multimedia programming this is silly -- inner loops are inner loops, and some of them can benefit from machine-specific optimization.
Theoretically you could experiment with the fully concurrent GC using an existing language/runtime like Java, but I've sort of given up on the JVM and
Well, the kernel definitely isn't written in Objective-C, here are the languages they use:
C for the kernel
Embedded C++ for the drivers (IO Kit)
But many of the applications that make up OS X however are written in Objective-C.
Troll?
Annoyed, enflamed perhaps, but Troll?
Sorry but it's a pet hate of mine that here on slashdot, which is supposed to be a forward looking tech board, that people still regularly espouse the view that threaded programming is something either still in development, too complex for ordinary mortals, or only applicable in a few scientific arenas.
It's just thoroughly incorrect. Industry and open source have been doing threading for years. Please can we lose this myth.
And to bring the post back on topic - pthreads in C will do it all nicely. Hell, even MS VC++ 6.0 (almost 10 years old?) will compile your multithreaded Windows C app.
I'd also lik to express suprise at the title of this article. C is losing popularity at the same position as last year, number 2? OK, it'll fizzle out any day now, I believe you.
I think my job's safe for now.
The Mac OS X kernel is entirely written in C except for the bits that have to be written in assembler.
The preferred run time for graphical applications is Objective C but I'm willing to bet that the low level graphics are done in C.
And Objective C is the bastard son of C and Smalltalk (but it's still my favourite programming language). It's probably equally closely related to Java and C++.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe