Why should learn C++?

You can not learn programming without a programming language and in the present world modern programming style is defined by C++ programming language. C++ defines the philosophy, syntax and style for other modern languages. It is also marked as an universal programming language. Because, to explain an algorithm or technique, normally C++ syntax are used. The development of language like Java and C# justifies the long-term sustainability of C++ in the computer world.

C++ is a statically typed, free-form, multi-paradigm, compiled, general-purpose programming language. It is regarded as a middle-level language, as it comprises a combination of both high-level and low-level language features.

As one of the most popular programming languages ever created, C++ is widely used in the software industry. Some of its application domains include systems software, application software, device drivers, embedded software, high-performance server and client applications, and entertainment software such as video games. Several groups provide both free and proprietary C++ compiler software, including the GNU Project, Microsoft, Intel and Borland. C++ is also used for hardware design, where design is initially described in C++, then analyzed, architecturally constrained, and scheduled to create a register transfer level hardware description language via high-level synthesis.

C++ is an object-oriented (OO) programming language that can be very efficient. It was the first very widely used OO language. C++ was very important in the 90s and early 2000s. C++ is still important in game programming and embedded device programming because in C++ you can:

• Write programs that are very efficient in memory usage - no managed object overhead and no garbage collection pauses

• Write programs that are very efficient in CPU usage - this language is very close to the hardware

• Use almost any CPU made - C++ compilers are very common

List of Applications designed using C++

Here, I have listed a few and mostly used softwares are developed in C++. This is an incomplete list and there are many more

1. Adobe Systems like Photoshop & ImageReady,Illustrator, Acrobat, InDesign, and GoLive are mostly designed in C++.

2. The Apple corporation used C++ to develop few parts of OS X. Like Finder, IOKit device drivers. The iPod user interface uses the Pixo application framework written in C++.

3. The Amdocs main telecom billing module (Enabler) is completely written in C++.

4. The AT&T largest telecommunication provider in the US uses C++ write a recovery system for the complete network failure.

5. Several high-performance and high-reliability components of Facebook are written in C++.

6. Google file systems and their web search engine is completely written in C++.

7. The world most leading image analysis programs like TrackEye and TEMA are written in C++.

8. IBM high performance, open source, general purpose operating system K42 is written in C++.

9. Intel performance analysis software Vtune is written in C++

10. Almost everything in Microsoft SQL, Windows XP, Vista, System 7, Microsoft Office is built using recent flavors of Visual C++.

C++ is preferred for competitive programming

It is very common thing people prefers C++ for programming contests and there are many reasons for this:

• C++ code runs faster than Java (at least 2x faster), there are some online judges like SPOJ or COJ where some problems are unsolvable in Java due to time limits, other problems are easily solvable in C++ with the correct algorithm while in Java you have to do a lot of optimization tricks to get accepted, another example is when a problem requires algorithms hiding a big constant in complexity, they usually perform really slow in Java.

• Default stack size in Java is very small (between 64kb and 1024kb depending on the OS), when implementing recursive solutions you may get a Runtime Error only for this, in Java can be avoided using a Thread trick but is boring to code it or you can forget about it, this is not a problem in C++ (this an important reason).

• C++ codes are shorter than Java codes, a shorter code can be written faster and in programming contests each second is important to get a better ranking.

• C++ has macros, many users use them and code becomes shorter.

• C++ has operator overloading, this may seem not so important but while dealing with objects like BigIntegers makes the code readable.

• All books I know about competitive programming have the sample code in C++.