Software testing company Tiobe, which maintains a monthly track of the popularity of countless programming languages among software developers, has chosen C++ as its programming language of the year 2022.
Despite being ranked third in Tiobe’s January 2023 index, C++’s popularity grew faster than all other languages last year, growing 4.26% from January 2022, the company said. said.
This year’s runner-up was C, the second most popular language, up 3.82%, and Python, the top language, up 2.78%. After falling from third place, Java is now in fourth place, up 1.55%.
“The reason why C++ is so popular is because of its excellent performance while being a high-level object-oriented language. Therefore, it is possible to develop large and fast software systems (more than millions of lines). code) in C++ without necessarily ending in a maintenance nightmare,” Tiobe CEO Paul Jensen says.
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He also attributed C++’s growing popularity to relatively recent C++20 update in December 2020. This is the latest version of C++ standardized by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and introduces cool features, such as module. C++ was created in 1985 by Danish computer scientist, Bjarne Stroustrup.
C++ is the main language used to build Chrome and has been the primary language, along with C, for the Android Open Source Project. C++ is also popular in systems programming, the automotive industry, the financial sector, and game development.
Regarding the Tiobe index, Jensen noted that C++ gained popularity when the C++11 standard was published in 2011, marking the first major increase since 1998.
“The adoption of this new standard [C++11] took several years because there was no C++ compiler available to support the new language definition. Because of C++11, C++ is slowly moving up in the TIOBE index after continuously falling since 2001. The second milestone is the recent C++20 publication,” noted Jensen.
Jensen also notes that rival C++ Rust makes the top 20 again (ranked at number 26 a year ago), but says that “it looks real this time”, suggesting it may now hold a decent spot. ranked in the top 20.
Rust’s profile skyrocketed in the past year after it was officially applied to Linux kernel version 6.1clearing the way for drivers written in Rust.
In many ways, C++ is an interesting choice for Tiobe’s language of the year. Mark Russinovich, CTO of Microsoft Azure, recently said that developers should avoid using C or C++ in new projects and instead use Rust for the sake of its memory safety, even urging the industry to declare those languages deprecated.
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The The Android Open Source Project, which adopted Rust in 2021, is handling its Rust adoption by keep existing C or C++ code but write new code in Rust. Its engineers made the decision after realizing that Rust could achieve a level of memory safety while delivering performance comparable to C and C++.
Even the NSA recently asked developers to think about moving from C and C++ to one memory safe programming language such as C#, Go, Java, Ruby, Rust and Swift.
Top 10 languages in Tiobe’s January 2023 index: Python, C, C++, Java, C#, Visual Basic, JavaScript, SQL, Assembly, and PHP.
Rounding out the top 20 are: Swift, Go, R, Classic Visual Basic, MATLAB, Ruby, Delphi, Rust, Perl and Scratch.
Tiobe says its ranking is based on the number of skilled engineers globally, courses and third-party providers. It also uses popular search engines to calculate ratings.
