Survey Says C Dominated New '08 Open-Source Projects

svonkie writes "C overwhelmingly proved to be the most popular programming language for thousands of new open-source projects in 2008, reports The Register (UK). According to license tracker Black Duck Software, which monitors 180,000 projects on nearly 4,000 sites, almost half — 47 per cent — of new projects last year used C. 17,000 new open-source projects were created in total. Next in popularity after C came Java, with 28 per cent. In scripting, JavaScript came out on top with 20 per cent, followed by Perl with 18 per cent. PHP attracted just 11 per cent, and Ruby six per cent. The numbers are a surprise, as open-source PHP has proved popular as a web-site development language, while Ruby's been a hot topic for many."

Comments

C? Here's the problem

[bogaboga]

While I would not like to start a flame war of words, I have an issue with Open Source Projects. There is one important statistic we cannot overlook; an over whelming number of OSS projects are non starters!

In other words, most of them die before they are even borne. Now, the author of this piece should have gotten us some stats on how many of these projects actually become something useful.

Re:how stupid

[module0000]

No, they are NOT programming languages. Don't ever delude yourself into thinking they are. A perl/python/ruby/whatever-you-learned-while-NOT-getting-a-cs program has no concept of memory management.

Re:Why are people surprised?

[maxwell demon]

C isn't the slightest bit more performant than C++. Everything you can do in C, you can do in C++ with exactly the same performance (often even by using exactly the same code). However, in C++ you can restrict that low-level stuff to those tiny parts of your application where ultimate performance matters, and use higher level stuff everywhere else. Not that always higher-level stuff is less performant anyway; unless you have a very good optimizer for C, I'd bet that an optimal C++ std::sort implementation consistently beats an optimal C qsort implementation, despite being higher level (no messing with void*).