After working exclusively in Java for several years, I have been dabbling in C++ for the last year or so. Question arises - is C++ still a viable language? If Tiobe Index is to be believed C++ has been steadily declining in popularity since about 2005 - coincidentally this was the year I decided to move from C++ to Java for my project SimpleDBM. At the time I stated my reasons for the move in my second blog post.
So what has happened in the meantime and is C++ still a viable language?
So what has happened in the meantime and is C++ still a viable language?
The place where I work (my day job) - I introduced Java in the realm of financial risk analytics. I led the team that converted a C++ based application to Java - and in the process we proved that the Java implementation was several times faster. The reason for this was nothing to do with the choice of the language - it was just that with Java you can focus on better algorithms and data structures, rather than fighting the language - which made all the difference in my view.
And yet it is in the realm of numerical computing where C++ is arguably the best language with the exception perhaps of Fortran (of which I have no experience sadly). The main advantages of C++ are:
- Ability to seamlessly call C++, Fortran and C libraries - a lot of high performance numerical libraries out there are written in these languages.
- Control of memory layout of data structures.
- Efficient array access via pointers - and no bounds checking.
- Templates for generating type specific code.
C++ is still an ugly language with too many features - but the recent changes in C++ 11 have made life tolerable if not completely easy. I have been looking at alternatives such as D, Go, Julia, etc. but haven't found a viable alternative yet. These other languages are either immature or have very restrictive paradigms. JVM based languages such as Scala have the same issues essentially as Java.
