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Waverley Instruments wrote: ↑Fri Nov 01, 2024 10:28 pm I'm just finishing up on a module and I know other devs would have laughed if I'd said I was writing it in Java.

A similar situation happened in the early 1980's when people scoffed at C and said it had terrible performance compared with assembly language.

But it didn't take long for C compilers to become much more proficient at code optimization than humans and eventually the argument went away.

IMO it's taking longer for the C++ / Java argument to be settled because C++ is probably the most difficult language every invented and C++ programmers have invested so much time and effort in trying to master it that there's an emotional barrier to moving on.

But I firmly believe that eventually C++ will go the same way as assembly language programming.

Partly because as the Java Virtual Machine evolves and new processors appear existing software written in languages like Java and Kotlin will automatically increase in efficiency as it exists as bytecode that can adapt without the involvement of the original developers while software written in languages like C++ exits as binary code that will forever remain frozen in time.

But the main reason I think C++ will eventually fade away is due to the cost of maintainence. C++ is an extremely messy low-level language that is very fragile and as software systems have grown in scale C++ just isn't up to the task. I'd argue that so much modern software is full of bugs precisely because it's written in C++ rather than a modern language like Java.