The last few years, many experts, magazines, web sites and developers talk about the C++ revival. This wave was initiated by the new C++11 standards and it may continue with the C++17 . But is these new standards were adopted by the companies? or just by the community?
If the companies ignore the new C++ features and prefer to move forward to other languages, all the effort to make C++ better will fail and unfortunately the language may die after few years.
Here’s our feedback from the CppDepend users about the use of the new standards in the companies:
The development of CppDepend V1 was achieved in 2009 and after few months we received many requests from the users; however, we didn’t expect at all that many of the users would ask us for features to assist their migration to new languages. They want more features to understand the existing code base before doing the migration. This recurrent request confirm to us that many companies move away from C++. Therefore, we have changed our landing page to add “Assist your Migration” as one of the three main features of the product.
After 2012 things have changed, and the companies ask us more for the C+11 support and very rarely when they ask about the migration. We remarked that C++11 was adopted very quickly by the companies as we had expected, and fortunately we use Clang as a parser which its team is very reactive to implements all the new standards. The companies ask us more to provide some features to do the refactory their code and use the new C++11 features. For this reason, we embedded the C++ modernizer tool and we changed our landing page to replace “Assist your migration” by “Assist your refactoring”.
What is next?
Before confirming that the new standards are not just its swan song, we need more feedbacks from the companies using C++. But even if the companies are now more confident about the future of C++ we need the rise of the C++ community like in the past. Indeed currently few bloggers are talking about C++, many bloggers have stopped to write posts and the community is dying. It’s true that after 2012 a big effort was done by some C++ experts to revive the community like Herb Sutter, Bjarne Stroustrup, Jens Weller and its meetingcpp events, Jon Kalb, Scott Meyers, Andrzej Krzemieński and many other actors, but we need more C++ developers to talk about their experience and their feedback. It will encourage more the companies to adopt more and more this amazing language.
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