C++ is dying?

The programming language C++ was created in 1985 and in 1995 a new programming language Java was created which was supposed to be the next big thing and kill off C++. It's 2023 and C++ is still going strong. Long story short C++ is over 35 years old and it's not dying.

JTC1/SC22/WG21 is an ISO working group which standardizes C++. Since, 2011 it has been publishing revisions of C++ standards every 3 years. The latest C++ standard is going to be released in December 2023 and it is being informally called C++23.

Source: Wikipedia

C++23 is the first release since C++98 which actually changes the way "hello world" program looks. This counts as a fundamental change. This proves that C++ is being actively worked on and getting steady updates. A project which is being actively worked on and improved upon, can't be dying. 

C++ dominates the windows application sector. Most of the software in Adobe creative suit, Microsoft office Applications are written in C++ at least the majority of the code base is. Web browsers like Google chrome, Microsoft edge and most of the existing web browsers use the chromium web engine which is written mostly in C++. Virtually every database engine is written in C++.

Most of the programming language rely on C++ as compilers like GCC, clang and by extension the llvm are written in C++. TensorFlow which is an open source machine learning framework, at least 56% of it's code base is written in C++. V8 which is a popular javascript engine is largely written in C++ as 68% of it's code base is in C++.

Source: Github

The game industry is heavily dependent on C++ most of the game engines like Unreal engine, Godot, Unity to name a few are written in C++. Having good knowledge about C++ is one of the requirements of working in the game industry. 

Industries like energy, energy modeling, simulation physics, automotive, security and financial use C++. Which means billions of line of code all over the world are deployed or written in C++. What I'm trying to say is it's obviously possible to replace these code bases with any other language but it's gonna take time and not gonna happen in the coming few years or more.

The plrank.com an aggregator website of all other programming language ranking websites ranks C++ in 6th place. It shows that the C++ aggregate score hasn't gone down in the last 6 months.

The TIOBE index ranks C++ in number 3 and the graph shows that the popularity C++ has been on a decline till 2018 and since 2018 it's popularity has been rising again.

 

C++ gets hate because of it's hard syntax but as a programming language it's a very fast and performant language. It's an all rounder language which can be used in a lot of use cases. Although many C++ successor languages have been announced. But none of them has really taken off. And are yet to reach anywhere near the popularity of C++.

So, It is safe to say, NO C++ is not dying as of now. Replacing it will be hard.