I use this language since more than 15 year. In time I augmented with stl/boost/asio/c++11. I never used the plain C. Based on this experience I would say:
1. If you are not already comfortable with the language don't use it. Use whatever you are best with at the moment.
2. Yes, you can do fine grained memory/disk/network management. However, this is a problem of how much time you invest. You are competing here with armies of developers that implemented this topics for you in "Java/C#". You are only one. I have doubts you will be more efficient.
3. The cross platform support is there but you must understand a few about each OS. At minimum you must understand something like CMake or the GNU build system. And, of course, the two mentioned above are not best suited for Windows.
4. If your project involves a UI don't code that in C++.
To your questions:
1. Yes boost does a very good job in abstracting the OS.
2. Yes asio is excellent when programming I/O.
3. On paper, I don't think there is a better language for "granular memory and disk management". However, if I were you I would use Java/C#. If When you will be in charge of a large team with a serious budget, think about C++ again.
Amazon is not cheap at all for your task and I am not sure you are looking into the right direction. In the last year I was doing feasibility studies for software in the cloud and I implemented already a system that relies on Amazon 100%. I have evaluated various technical solutions and various providers. My findings are the following:
1. Amazon is second to nothing when it comes to be elastic. If you want to scale from 10 to 100 (you name what you count: CPU/Memory/Storage/Band/DB...) you will have it in a minute. They can scale you inside the box and outside the box and this works perfect. Not the case with other cloud providers.
2. You get the goodies from 1 on a very hefty premium. Going on Amazon is more than twice more expensive than renting an enterprise class server in a datacenter. If you are not so fussy about the brand of the server this can be even 4 times more expensive. Of course you are on your own on the rented servers. All the maintenance is yours. For the kind of setup you describe this can cost you some money with the labor and it might cut the margins.
3. If you choose to use rented hardware the best is to use them as virtual machine farms. It might look awkward to have a machine that runs as visualization server only to one single virtual machine but this gives you that huge option to move the virtual machines as you see fit.
It looks to me like the elasticity is not your most important goal so it might happen you will be better on rented hardware. And again you must know that, after all that study, in my case I went for Amazon. Still, I need that elasticity...
It is silly to think about somebody that programs in these days using Notepad. It is possible in theory but, come on! A programmer should not struggle to do her work.
I think it was Joel (on Software) that mentioned some very important rules about programming:
1. A programmer should always be able to step into her code.
2. A programmer should always be able to inspect the state of the program (variables/registers/memory/...)
However, it is very questionable to rely on a particular IDE/tool To a serious extent it is even questionable to rely on a particular language. Being a programmer is about developing programs. About algorithms. The ability to develop algorithms that address one problem or another is the trademark of a professional programmer (and sometimes it is hard to get).
I have seen in my professional live wonderful IDE-s raising and even dying (take Delphi for example). I have seen the advent of plenty of new programming languages. And, while understanding that there is a time and a place for everything (yes, I did program using Notepad at some point in my live and yes, I do use Visual Studio/Eclipse/XCode today) one thing never changes:
I always develop algorithms.
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I use this language since more than 15 year. In time I augmented with stl/boost/asio /c++11. I never used the plain C. Based on this experience I would say:
1. If you are not already comfortable with the language don't use it. Use whatever you are best with at the moment.
2. Yes, you can do fine grained memory/disk/network management. However, this is a problem of how much time you invest. You are competing here with armies of developers that implemented this topics for you in "Java/C#". You are only one. I have doubts you will be more efficient.
3. The cross platform support is there but you must understand a few about each OS. At minimum you must understand something like CMake or the GNU build system. And, of course, the two mentioned above are not best suited for Windows.
4. If your project involves a UI don't code that in C++.
To your questions:
1. Yes boost does a very good job in abstracting the OS.
2. Yes asio is excellent when programming I/O.
3. On paper, I don't think there is a better language for "granular memory and disk management". However, if I were you I would use Java/C#. If When you will be in charge of a large team with a serious budget, think about C++ again.
Amazon is not cheap at all for your task and I am not sure you are looking into the right direction. In the last year I was doing feasibility studies for software in the cloud and I implemented already a system that relies on Amazon 100%. I have evaluated various technical solutions and various providers. My findings are the following: 1. Amazon is second to nothing when it comes to be elastic. If you want to scale from 10 to 100 (you name what you count: CPU/Memory/Storage/Band/DB...) you will have it in a minute. They can scale you inside the box and outside the box and this works perfect. Not the case with other cloud providers. 2. You get the goodies from 1 on a very hefty premium. Going on Amazon is more than twice more expensive than renting an enterprise class server in a datacenter. If you are not so fussy about the brand of the server this can be even 4 times more expensive. Of course you are on your own on the rented servers. All the maintenance is yours. For the kind of setup you describe this can cost you some money with the labor and it might cut the margins. 3. If you choose to use rented hardware the best is to use them as virtual machine farms. It might look awkward to have a machine that runs as visualization server only to one single virtual machine but this gives you that huge option to move the virtual machines as you see fit. It looks to me like the elasticity is not your most important goal so it might happen you will be better on rented hardware. And again you must know that, after all that study, in my case I went for Amazon. Still, I need that elasticity...
It is silly to think about somebody that programs in these days using Notepad. It is possible in theory but, come on! A programmer should not struggle to do her work. I think it was Joel (on Software) that mentioned some very important rules about programming: 1. A programmer should always be able to step into her code. 2. A programmer should always be able to inspect the state of the program (variables/registers/memory/...) However, it is very questionable to rely on a particular IDE/tool To a serious extent it is even questionable to rely on a particular language. Being a programmer is about developing programs. About algorithms. The ability to develop algorithms that address one problem or another is the trademark of a professional programmer (and sometimes it is hard to get). I have seen in my professional live wonderful IDE-s raising and even dying (take Delphi for example). I have seen the advent of plenty of new programming languages. And, while understanding that there is a time and a place for everything (yes, I did program using Notepad at some point in my live and yes, I do use Visual Studio/Eclipse/XCode today) one thing never changes: I always develop algorithms.