Folks, back in the old forum days we used to ban C# vs VB language wars, except on Friday. Since it's late Friday I want to mention I'm in a war (a skirmish) at the moment with a colleague who has been using Borland/Embarcadero C++ since it was created back in the early 90s. Some of our current products are mix of .NET tooling for most of the plumbing and UIs with a huge C++ "engine" which does the grunt work of reading and analysing huge text files of marketing data. It's a continual pain to maintain this native DLL in the suite and it's clumsy to Interop into its functions without any strongly-typed API.
I claimed this morning that "the age of C++ is over" … There is no convenient language or library support for asynchrony, multi-tasking, web service calls or manipulating popular formats like XML and JSON. I know my colleague has suffered dreadfully trying to get any of those things understood and working. He claims that C++ is still the best choice for desktop development which is computationally intensive. I said that may have been true before modern languages arrived with GCs and highly optimised JIT compilers. In fact I said the old claim that "C++ is best for high performance" is now an urban legend. However, I now have to back-up my claim. Is the age of C++ over? Does anyone have a really strong opinion on this? *Greg K*
