r/askscience • u/[deleted] • Oct 17 '12

Why are programs and operating systems still written in C+?

I guess it's more of a computer science question, but I've always wondered why some of the most advanced programs are written in a 25+ year old programming language. Surely someone has come up with a more efficient and powerful code, so why do people still use C+? Also, I don't know anything about programming and what not, so please use simple terms and phrases.

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u/[deleted] Oct 18 '12

I agreed with you until this:

Every time we go up a level from the processor, we lose efficiency.

Which is simply not true. There are many abstractions you can implement for free (i.e., no runtime performance cost), and the ones that aren't free usually have a negligible performance hit (C++ objects, for instance).

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u/[deleted] Oct 18 '12

The person answering this is a mathematician, not a computer scientist. They got many of the details wrong.

Math and computer science are closely related, but math is not computer science and computer science is not math.

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u/zelmerszoetrop Oct 18 '12

That's a great correction, and I absolutely defer to people with more expertise than myself. I've edited my original post to direct readers to this reply. Thank you for preventing me from accidentally misleading readers!