Why did c plus plus become more popular inspite of so many object oriented languages available?

Answer 1

All languages are interesting to some degree or another. Programming languages in particular allow us humans to communicate with and ultimately control computers, bending them to our will. However, some languages are better than others for certain tasks. C++ is a general purpose, cross-platform, high-level language that can produce highly-efficient machine code (the native language of the computer). What makes it interesting is subjective -- each programmer will have their own likes and dislikes -- but ultimately the language gives a high-degree of control over the hardware, exploiting specific features of the architecture.

The same kind of thing can be achieved using Assembly Language (a low-level language), and in many ways would be regarded as a more interesting language than C++. But it is extremely difficult to work with. Even if you have access to a vast library of pre-written routines, you still require intimate knowledge of the underlying hardware and must write programs in minute detail. C++ can achieve similar results, but the abstraction between the hardware and the code you write is such that you needn't concern yourself with the hardware quite so much. That is, a single instruction in C++ can easily generate dozens of assembly instructions.

C++ becomes more interesting when compared to languages that don;t provide the level of control, such as Java. This is an entirely object-oriented programming language, with a higher-degree of abstraction (with little or no interaction with the underlying architecture). Rather than producing machine code, Java produces byte code which can be run on any platform that supports the Java Virtual Machine. As such, it is more portable as programs need only be compiled once to run on any platform whereas C++ code must be compiled separately for each platform, and must include code to filter out code that is irrelevant to the current platform. However, since Java programs must run in a virtual machine, they are very much slower than equivalent C++ programs.

C++ is also more interesting in that you aren't restricted to using object-oriented programming principals. You can choose to mix C++ code with C-style code (which is a structured language) and also raw assembly routines, thus making it far more flexible than Java, which is entirely object-oriented.

Although there's little you can't do in C++, that doesn't make it the best language in every situation. For instance, if you have a deadline to meet, C++ might be too complex a language to meet that deadline, thus forcing you to use a more abstract language designed specifically for rapid application development (RAD). For instance, it's often useful to model algorithms and design concepts using a RAD before committing yourself to a more lengthy software development in C++. The feedback from the RAD can, in fact, reduce the overall development cycle as the models can often be incorporated into the final design with only minimal or trivial modification.

However, C++ comes into its own when high-performance is the main criteria, and raw Assembly Language would be far too costly to implement in a reasonable time-frame. Modern compilers can optimise the machine code in much the same way an Assembly Language programmer exploits hardware features to produce highly-efficient code, but there's often room for further improvement. However, C++ is flexible enough to allow the programmer to make these adjustments by hand. And, for me, that's where things can get really interesting.

Answer 2

C++ allows the programmer to write general purpose programs using high-level object-oriented code to produce robust, scalable solutions that perform extremely well on a wide variety of hardware. The programmer is also free to incorporate low-level procedural code very similar to C in order to produce highly-efficient machine code. This gives the programmer the best of both worlds.

Answer 3

C++ gives you all the benefits of low-level C as well as high-level abstraction through object oriented programming. Hence it is often called a mid-level language. In reality it is just "C with Classes", which was the original name before it became C++.

The abstraction and modularisation of code allows you to express your ideas directly within the code itself. The C++ standard library is replete with ideas expressed in code to the point that code becomes self-documenting. Self-explanatory code is much easier to read and maintain than code containing lots of user-defined comments. Although comments are useful, if over-used they can actually get in the way of the reader, interrupting the flow of the code. More importantly, the compiler ignores user-comments -- they are only of benefit to the programmer, and only if they actually read them! By expressing ideas directly in code, the compiler can help the programmer track down and eliminate bugs more easily -- especially those invariants that would otherwise be guarded by an otherwise useless comment.

Answer 4

C++ is a general-purpose programming language that compiles to machine code. By comparison, Java compiles to byte code, which needs to be interpreted by the Java virtual machine. Although this makes Java much more portable than C++, performance suffers as a result of the interpretation. C++ also includes pointer variables that allow more efficient coding, similar to that of assembler language.

Answer 5

Primarily to add object-oriented programming to the ANSI C language. C++ literally means the successor to C, and was originally developed as an extension to ANSI C called 'C with Classes', which later became a language in its own right, renamed C++. It still inherits from ANSI C, with some minor differences primarily to conform with OOP principals, but you can choose to use ANSI C or C++, or a mixture of both, even in the same program.