Why C++ is the perfect choice for modern app development

[nedo]

It feels a bit ironic to be discussing, in 2014, if C++ is a viable, or more importantly, a great choice for multi-device, multi-platform app development. It’s ironic in the sense that despite the attention Objective-C, Java, and C# get for app development, most of the software we use on a daily basis is written in C/C++ and after all these years represents the largest community of developers.

There are many reasons to use C++ for your current and future app development and I will discuss five key reasons after a brief history.

A Brief History of C++

Bjarne Stroustrup, at Bell Labs designed C++ in the early 80s, as an object oriented language based on the C language, which powered pretty much all systems software since its creation in 1972. The need for an object-oriented language, at Bell Labs, was clear -- large systems software needed language facilities for better organized and architected apps as capacity and performance requirement increased. C++ was quickly adopted for all types of development and in particular in the telecommunication industry given its heritage from Bell Labs and is still widely used today to power the switching systems and operating systems that enable this widely connected world we live in today. C++ became an international ANSI/ISO standard in 1988 and has been update by the standards committee several times over the years, most notably with a major update in 2011 the publication of the C++11 standard, which focused on improving the usability of the more complicated aspects of the language. And, in my opinion, it succeeded.

Despite the popularity of Java, C#, and Objective-C, C++ remains the most widely used language in the world. A recent report from Evans Data Corporation, that closely tracks worldwide language usage, found that over 11 million professional developers know and use C++ regularly. There was a reason Java and C# borrowed their syntax heavily from C++, there are a lot of developers who know the language. This means finding (or training) resources for C++ will not a problem. It also means there is plenty of C/C++ support for any functionality you may need to integrate into an existing application.

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