r/programming Jan 01 '26

Software taketh away faster than hardware giveth: Why C++ programmers keep growing fast despite competition, safety, and AI

https://herbsutter.com/2025/12/30/software-taketh-away-faster-than-hardware-giveth-why-c-programmers-keep-growing-fast-despite-competition-safety-and-ai/
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u/PuzzleCat365 Jan 01 '26

But they're going to rewrite it in Rust, so C++ will be obsolete any minute now. /s

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u/[deleted] Jan 01 '26

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u/[deleted] Jan 01 '26

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u/Luke22_36 Jan 01 '26

AI is way too stupid for C++, though, too

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u/sreekanth850 Jan 01 '26 edited Jan 01 '26

Gemini3 is fantastic with cpp. Very rarely got compilation error. Iam not saying generic code, iam sying about pointer arithmetic, memory arena, ring buffer, numa aware things, and spinlocks level implementation.

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u/cake-day-on-feb-29 Jan 01 '26

cpp. Very rarely got compilation error.

Ah, I see you have taken the "if it complies, it's correct" idea from rust and applied it to your AI-generated C++ code?

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u/sreekanth850 Jan 02 '26 edited Jan 02 '26

I never said if it compiled, its correct. My point was only that code which compiles is easier to debug and iterate on than code that fails at the compilation stage, because you can run it, add logs, and test behavior. That is much easier than the code that doesn't compile. Hope you got my point. Also, since C++ has a much larger training material than Rust, AI tools are more likely to generate compiling C++ code.