C++ Today: The Beast is Back - Jon Kalb [ACCU 2018]

This presentation will cover why engineers looking for performance choose C++. I will present a historical perspective of C++ focusing on what’s going on in the C++ community right now and where the language and its user base is heading. With a renewed interest in performance for both data centers and mobile devices, and the success of open source software libraries, C++ is back and it is hot. This presentation will explain why C++ is most software engineers' go-to language for performance. You will receive a rough historical sketch that puts C++ in perspective and covers its popularity ups and downs.

This talk is based, in part, on the book "C++ Today: The Beast is Back" published by O’Reilly.

[bdafeesh]

Wow, someone tell this camera man to relax. Honestly, a fixed camera in the center is all we needed...

[पापानटोले]

Cameraman appears to be Java Developer.

[AnotherGenericChannel]

At 56:32 If you consider that there are around 5.3 billion people on Eastern side of the map and around 566 million people on the Western side of the map before considering those numbers...

[fromgermany]

„we can skip pointers“

In fact, pointers seen in a Pascal course while being an ee student in 1983 made me switch to computer science and that was what I do till then. Remember, in these days ee students had Fortan classes and there was this Pascal course during the summer holidays. It took some time (until 1990) until I had borland C and the first gcc (in 32-bit mode!) on my pc.

[ogamiitto]

First I would like to say that I really enjoyed this talk ‒ especially the history bits at the beginning were a nice touch.

That being said, I have to admit that I'm also one of those who learned to program in C++ before it was standardized, and there is a single point Jon Kalb makes with which I strongly disagree:

While Java may have been touted as the „Language of the Web“ or thought to be „Easier to learn and to teach“, I very strongly believe that this wasn't (and isn't) the reason for its popularity.

It's rather quite simple: even Java 1.0 shipped with an accompanying library that ‒ in the spirit of Python's motto ‒ came with „batteries included“. To this day I can clearly remember the exhilaration I felt when I realized that it may no longer be necessary to link to third-party libraries, because one could „live“ in this „Java SDK“ without every leaving its boundaries. (While that wasn't really true during the first releases, it really has ‒ almost ‒ become true since then.)

Keeping this last thought in mind I'm also convinced that the entire Java/C# episode would have been avoidable from the start ‒ if, only if the C++ standard library hadn't always been limited to its bare essentials, but instead had developed a standardized set of classes (comparable in size to offerings of languages like Java and C#).

In this regard, the C++ standards committee still doesn't seem to „get it“: people don't ‒ necessarily ‒ want a better language (I couldn't care less for range-for, for example). They will, however, usually prefer languages with large standard libraries to those with smaller ones. (And, no, mentioning Qt or WxWidgets doesn't improve this situation one bit.)

As someone who has programmed in C++ for quite a few years I feel really sad in saying this, but: C++ isn't back! (And releasing a new standard every three years won't help.)

In the end, to many institutions have moved on. Universities now churn out graduates who are accustomed to programming in languages like Java, C# or JavaScript. Like any sun, C++ will also die a slow death … it may still have millions of users, but in 20 years time it'll only be mentioned on slides titled „history“, if at all.

[arma]

there is no way that a humanbeing is controling the camera. it must be a robot that tracks the guy

[pauloperbone]

Another great video! Although I think jokes about Java is really getting old... It's like seeing Linus saying that C++ is a horrible language, does not bring nothing to the table.