C++ is still the best choice

Are most criticisms of C++ thinly veiled, "it's too hard for me" excuses? All my profs speak highly of C++ and emphasize the importance of learning it to make high performance applications. Stack Overflow seems to like it as well.

Why does 4chan hate it so?

>>30
it lets you do things how you want them to do it efficiently and straightforwardly.
When compilers can't.

For many applications, the "what needs to be done" model simply does not work or is too slow.
They're quite a few, but it's totally relevant to write significant portions of them as “close to the metal” as possible.

This is why C/C++ is popular.
C gained remarkable popularity as tools and systems made in C gained of widespread usage. Also, C is quite simple and can be mastered by any CS freshman in a few days or weeks. I guess this is why it's popular.

[>>1 pay attention, please]

C++, on the other hand, has a lot of interesting functionalities, but they showed up to be conflicting, resulting in a very verbose language, with lots of pitfalls that only can be mastered with enough time and practice.
Although it's really complicated, it took less time [for lots of previous C programmers] to learn a usable enough subset of C++, and use OOP/generics with their old C code. Taking time to learn a different OO/metaprogramming language and gluing them together with ffi didn't look as a sensible choice back then.

Time passes, and as the C++ code base grew bigger, the language problems showed up, such the slow compilation and lack of IDE/tools support. Newer languages like Java and C# worked around these problems and are much more popular than C++ by now. Also, JIT and GC improvemet made these languages available to performance-sensitive, but soft real-time, applications.

Today, the lack of an C++ ABI standardization and its great language complexity just make newer programmers to interface directly with C. Just use a scripting language, with tons of libraries, for soft tasks like GUI, logic and reading files [which are often backed by C libraries, like win32/gtk, libmpc and async OS calls], and leaving intensive computing tasks to custom written C functions with bindings [which are widely supported, instead of C++].

It's this, I don't think that “C++ is still the best choice”, and with this new trend called data oriented design, there isn't much place for C++ OOP anyway. Maybe at Google.