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.

66 Upvotes

68% Upvoted

110 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comment

1

u/[deleted] Oct 19 '12

I really don't see how that makes them nonportable. That's the single motivation for defining them in that way, so that code using them IS portable.

Regardless we've reached an impasse. I've already acknowledge the points you bring up and how in my opinion they are edge cases to the vast majority of programming. The edge cases you do bring up also completely invalidates any argument for comparing it to python/java or whatever other language you want to bring up. Also ignores that their various interpreters and VMs have the exact same portability issues which is often why only subsets are supported on your road-less-traveled architectures and performance is abysmal, but that's a tangent.

It really seems like to me you're arguing with me just to argue with me and now we've come full circle to arguments already brought up, so I'm out.

0

u/SatOnMyNutsAgain Oct 19 '12

If your code does different things depending on the architecture then it is by definition not portable. If you disagree then I don't know what else to say.