C++ luminary Herb Sutter has joined Microsoft's Developer Platform and Evangelism Division as liaison to the C++ developer community. What does he plan do for you? What does he plan to do for C++? Our C++ Pro, Danny Kalev, interviewed Herb Sutter about his new job, the role of C++ in the .NET framework, and the current state of C++.
Man, with Stan Lippman and Herb Sutter both on the MS C++ team, I am extremely excited about the future of this product!
I like this:
My job definitely includes giving direct input into the feature set for future releases of Visual C++, to make sure that the product has what the C++ community needs. Note that by "the C++ community," I mean everyone who works for or with C++, on all compilers and platforms—that includes in-the-trenches systems and application developers, developers of C++ community libraries like Boost and Loki, the C++ standards committee, C++ book and magazine authors, and anyone else plugged into C++.
and:
The other big part of my job is to see how we can better contribute to the global C++ community. That includes doing things like taking cool and useful libraries developed internally in places like Microsoft Research and contributing them for the community to use, whether that's by contributing them to community libraries or via MSDN or some other route.
I've never heard that. The short answer is that I don't take on jobs as PR stunts. Neither, I am sure, do people like Stan Lippman and Don Box. We're at Microsoft because we're excited about Microsoft's C++ direction and about .NET.
Q: Considering Microsoft's strong emphasis on C# these days, what is the role of C++ in their .NET Framework?
A: C++ continues to be the dominant language for most kinds of development on Windows. In the .NET world, C++ is still the best-performing language for most development work. The need for a flexible programming language that can handle everything from high-level abstraction to bit-twiddling, all unified within the same language, isn't going away anytime soon. Other useful programming languages, including C#, will continue to be useful for the kinds of things they're designed to do. I certainly hope that C# will be the destination of choice for a lot of today's Visual Basic application developers. That would be quite a step forward. For systems programming, C++ is still tough to beat despite all the naysayers' wishful thinking that C++ will just roll over and go away. Even in its first incarnation, Managed C++ is the best .NET programming language for creating efficient, performance-oriented applications, and Managed C++ will continue to be improved to increase its overlap with Standard C++.
For about six years now, certain vendors and many so-called industry experts have constantly predicted Java use to overtake C++ use "within two years." It always seems to be "within two years," for some reason. I first heard that kind of claim around 1996. Today, six years later, about 3 million of the approximately 9.5 million software developers worldwide use C++. Java still comes in a distant second or third at about 50 percent to 70 percent of the C++ developer numbers, depending on which study you look at.
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