Would you recommend C++ for some systems where practitioners are reluctant to use it, such as system software and embedded applications?

Bjarne: Certainly, I do recommend it and not everybody is reluctant. In fact, I don’t see much reluctance in those areas beyond the natural reluctance to try something new in established organizations. Rather, I see steady and significant growth in C++ use. For example, I helped write the coding guidelines for the mission-critical software for Lockheed Martin’s Joint Strike Fighter. That’s an “all C++ plane.” You may not be particularly keen on military planes, but there is nothing particularly military about the way C++ is used and well over 100,000 copies of the JSF++ coding rules have been downloaded from my home pages in less than a year, mostly by nonmilitary embedded systems developers, as far as I can tell.

C++ has been used for embedded systems since 1984, many useful gadgets have been programmed in C++, and its use appears to be rapidly increasing. Examples are mobile phones using Symbian or Motorola, the iPods, and GPS systems. I particularly like the use of C++ on the Mars rovers: the scene analysis and autonomous driving subsystems, much of the earth-based communication systems, and the image processing.

People who are convinced that C is necessarily more efficient than C++ might like to have a look at my paper entitled “Learning Standard C++ as a New Language” [C/C++ Users Journal, May 1999], which describes a bit of design philosophy and shows the result of a few simple experiments. Also, the ISO C++ standards committee issued a technical report on performance that addresses a lot of issues and myths relating to the use of C++ where performance matters (you can find it online searching for “Technical Report on C++ Performance”).* In particular, that report addresses embedded systems issues.

Source of Information : Oreilly - Masterminds of Programming

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