The Value of Learning C++ in Software Development

C++ equips developers with essential skills in memory management, enhancing their programming capabilities across various languages.

### The Value of Learning C++: Insights and Considerations
* 💻 C++ is a general-purpose programming language that has been widely used for nearly **40 years**, and its worthiness as a learning endeavor largely depends on **individual goals**.
* 📚 Understanding C++ or C is beneficial for grasping **memory management concepts**, which can enhance comprehension of other languages like **Rust and Zig**.
* 🎮 C++ is highly versatile and applicable across various fields, including **game development**, **web APIs**, **mobile apps**, and more, making it a **valuable skill to possess**.
* ⚡ C++ is known for its **speed** due to low-level abstraction and direct compilation to machine code, making it suitable for mission-critical applications where **performance is essential**.
* 💰 The demand for C++ developers is expected to remain strong, especially as the pool of **qualified candidates diminishes**, which could lead to **higher salaries and job opportunities**.
* 🔍 While C++ offers many advantages, its complexity and low-level features can pose challenges, requiring a **solid understanding of advanced topics** like **memory management** and **thread synchronization**.
* 🌐 Despite its age, C++ continues to evolve, with **new features being added regularly**, though some may find its tooling and project organization **less user-friendly** compared to other languages.
* 🧠 Ultimately, learning C++ can **significantly improve one's software engineering skills** and understanding of programming concepts, making it a **worthwhile pursuit for aspiring developers**.

C++ is a general-purpose programming language that has been in widespread use for nearly 40 years, but is it worth spending time learning and understanding this monster of a language? Well, as most things when it comes to software development, it depends, specifically on what you're looking for. Therefore, we're

going to look at some of the reasons you may want to learn C++. I'm going to give a contrarian opinion, which is I think you should learn C or C++ regardless of what your goals or outcomes should be. You should do it because it is really good to

understand memory, and even in Rust to really appreciate or understand what Rust is doing, a bit of knowledge of C++ or C is not bad. When I say C or C++, I don't really care which one you choose, as long as you're like in the process of

manually creating and destroying memory right. Even Zig, in some sense, Zig kind of has this abstract, a slightly different abstraction, a different abstraction where it's like a little bit different. I, you could substitute Zig in there. You could substitute Zig in there. All right, someone is saying, uh,

reduce the OS volume. You might, you might be, you might be correct. I, I did something recently. Output, oh yeah, let's go like that. There we go, baby cakes, let's go. I had to turn it up because of something that was happening earlier, so here we go, let's do this again as well.

as some of the reasons why you may wish to avoid it. C++ is perhaps one of the most versatile languages out there. In fact, I'd argue it's perhaps the one language that can do it all. To give some of my own history, C++ was the first

programming language I learned, and because of this, it has enabled me more than anything else. I had originally wanted to learn how to code video games when I was younger, in which C++ is highly used in the game industry. Mhm, however, I quickly learned with C I did

XNA back when I wanted to be a game programmer. I used XNA, a C#... come on, you remember that little Ren'Der update, cornflower blue. Never at the touch Win32, man. I can be a Chad GPT poem creator just there. Found C++ could be

used for pretty much any software project. Yep, including web APIs, mobile apps, data science, embedded systems, cross-platform GPU processing, and many others. Yeah, C++ really can be used for pretty much anything. Therefore, by learning C++, you're guaranteed to have a language available to you that you can

use to build whatever you want. C++ is fast. In fact, C++ along with C are often used as the baseline languages for benchmarking performance. The reason it's so fast is due to its low level of abstraction within the language and the fact it compiles down

to machine code. Therefore, if you're looking for a language that is used in mission-critical applications where the lowest of latency is required, then C++ is a fantastic choice. Okay, okay, these are all good reasons, uh, practical purposes for why you should consider using C++. Uh, just putting it that way,

it's a good reason to consider using C++. It's not, not really why you should learn C++ or the heart behind it, but it is good application space to learn it. I, I can agree with things. This C++ is used in a number of industries where

other languages just aren't viable. One of these industries is finance, where even a few milliseconds of latency can cause a good trade to be missed. Jane Street, I mean, so there is a little bit of a weirdness to that. So anyone that's doing that type of trading, 

especially like Forex exchange, that kind of stuff, you know, Forex stuff uh usually that stuff is all done with programmable FPGAs and so you're not really using C++ you're using FPGAs. And Jane Street I think uses OCaml to program their 

FPGAs, so is that, you know, entirely accurate? Maybe it's not entirely accurate. Uh, let's just be real. When I built my own little Trader and lost thousands of dollars uh on the Bitcoin market, and I I wrote that, I wrote that 

in JavaScript, okay. So I mean, look at me, I I made multi-negative thousand. I bought high, sold low. I literally did one time buy high and sell low. Uh, I was I was super good. As with all power, there are caveats, however, because of C++'s low 

level of abstraction. Advanced topics such as memory management or thread synchronization aren't hidden away from the developer. This means whilst it's possible to write very performant code, it's also very possible to make some pretty performant mistakes because C++ provides very 

little abstraction. It means that many concepts that are hidden away in other languages are able to be learned when using C++. Topics such as pointers, mutexes, pass by reference, pass by value, the heap versus the stack, and many, many others are all hidden away in higher 

level languages such as Python, Go, and even Java. Not entirely true with Go, you kind of need to know when things should be heap versus stack allocated, and then on top of it there is, you know, there is pointer receiver versus value receivers, and you know, like there is there is some

level of knowledge when it comes to this that it's not it's not it's not entirely accurate to say that um Rust almost has like a completely different kind of structure to it. Do you know what I mean? Like Rust is kind of, I don't know, it's

kind of it's kind of unique because uh because references are are types, right? And so it kind of causes like a a uniqueness, mutability almost is a type, and so it's like it causes some, it's a little different, right? So it's

kind of hard to put it in these exact same bounds even though pass by value versus pass by reference, like that does exist, whatever blah blah blah blah, but it's just like when you're using it it just feels different, you know what I mean? Also uh I just noticed that uh

there's been quite a few follows and I did want to shout this out that we are so dang close. Look at that, 134 left. Let's go! All right, back to the value, 134 left. That doesn't mean they no longer exist, however, quite the opposite.

It is just that the language does a very good job of preventing the developer from ever needing to interact with them, but that doesn't mean developers shouldn't know about them. And by learning and using C++, you'll encounter all of the little finger is the worst

These concepts, at some point in your journey, you'll also be able to bring this understanding and knowledge to other programming languages, which can help you to make better decisions when building solutions in the future. When you are presented with these problems in your journey to learn C++, it can be whoa...

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mentioned, C++ has been around for nearly 50 years and it isn't going anywhere anytime soon. I think there's actually something to be said about its demand, which is that there are so many systems out there that have been created around C++. And as C++ is kind of in its long lost

its vogue and so on average, people aren't kind of like learning or becoming experts in C++ outside of the gaming industry. And I feel, or outside of the gaming, maybe the embedded industry, one could argue that there's some C++, but you know, as far as I can tell, it's

mostly a lot of C. Uh, at least when I did it, it was all C, right? Right. Uh, and so when I look at this, what I see is that there's going to become a very valuable job market because as that niche becomes smaller, as the people who can write C++

reduces it simply, it just becomes massively more expensive to hire and thus it will become a more valuable and desired language. Right, so there's kind of this weird cyclical nature of programs, which is like, you know, it starts off, it's the bleeding edge cool thing to use. This is

where everyone's getting paid, it then goes down because everybody now knows it and then everyone stops using it and then all of a sudden it goes back up because now people aren't, uh, you know, there's just less candidates available, right? It's the supply and demand curve just

in the most beautiful kind of way. I, you can imagine that this happened with React too. When React started to come out and it was the big thing and all the startups were using it, they were all looking for anyone who was adept at using React, which was a small

pool of candidates. And then within a few years, it's now like a legacy system in so many start, uh, in so many companies that hiring React engineers, you know, engineers who know React is exceptionally simple now. So it's like this funny thing, uh, RxJS was that way.

That's how I got hired at Netflix. Big companies such as Google, Apple, and Adobe are heavily invested in the C++ ecosystem. Not only this, it's also used in many other industries such as video games, movie production, telecommunications, scientific research, and financial, as we mentioned earlier.

Even the Bitcoin source code is written in C++. Imagine if Bitcoin was written in JavaScript. Therefore, if you're interested in a language that will stand up to the test of time, well C++ is one of them. And even though C++ has been around for a very long time, this doesn't

I mean it's outdated, which brings me on to reason number five. Ooh, this looks like a double-edged sword right here. C++ was created back in 1985 by Bjarne Stroustrup. Since then, it has become a standardized language by the International Organization for Standardization, you know, isn't

it kind of wild to think about how old the technology is and even wilder to think that uh TCP was invented in years before this and even wilder to think that I believe VI was invented 11 years before C++. Bill Joy was like, yep, and did

that dude, it's like it's kind of wild to think about all the tech we use today like how actually like long ago it really was and how well these things have stood the test of time. It's it's kind of it's wild. Also known as ISO, this means

that versions of C, your university professor implemented TCP/IP, what a Chad, plus plus, are actively developed and standardized. And since 2011, new versions have been released every three years. By the way, the compiler largely is like stuck right here. We're

we're still trying to implement 2017, boys. Okay, we're not up to 2020. Okay, what is all this 2020 talk? Oh gosh, there's still 2023. We got new features and improvements. Okay, hey, just because, just because features keep on going until

morale improves doesn't mean it's necessarily good. So I actually would consider this as one of C uh C++'s biggest weaknesses is that it it's extremely in some sense un-Lindy in the fact that if you look at C written 10

years ago versus C written today, it's pretty much the same. C written 20 years ago versus 10 years ago versus today is pretty much the same, but if you look at C++ 20 years ago, 10 years ago, 5 years ago, two years ago, one year ago, today, 

like they're all very, very different. And is that a good thing, a bad thing? There's good things about it, but there's also really just bad things and annoying things about it. And so it's, it's definitely not like a huge W, uh, but I

would say unique pointers were awesome, right? The fact that C++ has unique pointers, I'm happy about it. It has shared pointers, I'm happy about it, right? There's some good things about it to the standard library, despite the language being centered around low-level

abstractions, we've seen a number of new features appear, such as smart pointers, lambda expressions, automatic lambda expressions. Have you ever wanted to hate syntax? Well, let me show you a lambda expression. You know that one meme with the guy sitting there is like, "I hate

myself." He's like, "Here, look at this." And then it's a C++ lambda expression. He's like, "I hate this. I, I hate this more." That's pretty much me when I see that. So I'm going to take a small little picture of this little bad boy, and we will be

using it in a meme shortly. Um, let's go over, over here. Uh, there we go. Let's grab a little bit of this fantastic and MIT licensing lambdas. Are they nice? Sure, they're nice, not in C++. Oh, you don't define your capture group, type deduction, and many others.

having these features in C++ allows it to have the best of both worlds enabling developers to either use modern features to ease development or to dive into lower level abstractions for greater control it's your choice yeah I feel like that's you know dreams of code I feel like that was a little

bit of a happy painting maybe throw a little "Little Couple" cons in there you know couple cons were well-deserved but overall like C++ is becoming a more convenient language uh real talk it is becoming more convenient but that doesn't mean it it's not without its

difficulties and Legacy is a large part of what you do so it can be really difficult right it is so C++ is pretty great and you may think it's worthwhile learning but before jumping into a C++ tutorial it's worth understanding some of the drawbacks to the language let's

gobe the tooling around C++ is nowhere near as wonderful as it is in other languages in fact organizing your code project and build tools are probably some of the harder parts of using C++ there's hey kids you want to learn a language called C++ well let me teach

you cmake you're just like what what is cmake do cmake makes make files you're like what what do make files do make files make the project you're like what what the we talking about here how did we land here very little handholding here unless you use an IDE which I'd

probably recommend to somebody new to C++ setting up your project with configurations and make files is going to be way too much just to get started only you have a fundamental he's not ready he's not ready for Enterprise lack of dependency management available to

you instead rely on system libraries instead of what other languages provide such as npm for Node.js or pip with Python. I actually think Go does it the best. I think Go using GitHub or any Git URL is truly, or any URL type resource out item, I think truly is the best way

to go about it. I absolutely love Go's library management. I I just think or Go's library I just think it's the best. However, this does mean you'll have a greater understanding of your operating system and how to deploy code differently to other languages if you

really want to learn as much as you can about software development, then C++ can help you get there. But if you just want to build something as quick as possible, then C++ is probably not the right choice. Correct. It's no secret that C++ is incredibly complex. In fact, this

complexity has been the main point of criticism from many notable programmers such as Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, Rob Pike, one of the creators of both Go and Unix, and Ken Thompson, who designed the predecessor to the C programming language. [Applause]

You know, I just love the fact that they actually they accidentally uh put in the wrong character. Clearly, they put in one of the core Rust maintainers in here. Um, they clearly didn't put in Ken Thompson. Okay, clearly one of the core Rust maintainers here. B for Bobby.

C++ itself has many, many features, all of which you'll end up encountering as you slowly progress through learning the language. Each of these features comes with its own, and you're likely going to break things over and over again. God is a real person. This is all part of the process.

however, and with the PTSD you gain from learning the language, you will come through the other side a better developer for it. This, for me, is the greatest reason to learn C++. And you'll learn concepts about software engineering that you'll be able to take

with you to pretty much any other language. Yep, except maybe Haskell, which is another topic for another time. Avoid success at all costs. Classic H.C.L.L. avoiding success at all. Successfully avoiding success. Oh man, hey, that was a great video. I do agree, especially the last part about learning

C++. Nothing has made me write better JavaScript than understanding how memory and things work. It is a vitally important task you should consider doing, which is to understand the difference between a heap and the stack. Just managing your own memory, freeing it, and then starting to just, in your head, think

about the GC when you go into your program, your inevitable crappy JavaScript program that you're trying to make the best, and you're just doing things like const a equals some other B when some other C, right? And you can go, wait a second, what's happening here? I

know what's happening because I've written some C++. I can kind of understand what's going on here. Yeah, maybe I should find a better way of doing this, right? Just writing non-pessim code, cuz if you look at most of JavaScript, it's just pessim code after

pessim code, cuz it's just a super simple abstraction to do that. It's not a bad thing because it allows you to move fast. It's a bad thing when everyone does it and you grow a project out of scope of being able to make a simple change like

there's this thing that shows up in React where they say if you make this change in React um it's considered kind of bad practice it can cause a lot of renders when you don't realize it it's kind of caused a lot of garbage collection blah blah blah blah and what

it is is passing in raw JavaScript objects as props right and so that's considered a bad thing so I built the little uh LSP uh called uh JS perf and what I can do is as a CLI application it can go in there and it can scan an entire

directory and tell you everywhere that you're passing in a raw JavaScript object or raw JavaScript array I could even do functions and things like that and it turns out in the TVI codebase on Netflix there was over 1300 occurrences in

production code if the problem is is that one a one-time decision is never pretty much ever a bad thing it's when you have that one-time decision that's made by 50 people over the course of several years you just build a project that probably renders way more times

than it needs to and probably just has a bunch of problems a bunch of time spent in garbage collection that doesn't isn't needed all because a bunch of small bad decisions equal a bad decision overall super hard to track down impossible to try to fix it's just not

trivial and so that's why it's like a big thing I try to think about which is avoid pessimization and where that came from was just uh you know Casey Muratori was the one that really kind of voiced it in such a good way but it's just all

those years of just using Rust, using C++, using something that kind of really teaches me about how this stuff, like how the world works, right? And so I don't know, just a thought, something that I've really appreciated, something that I've genuinely enjoyed, so I hope that you

like this, I hope that you enjoyed all this. The name is the Primogen

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C++ is a versatile language used for nearly 40 years.

Understanding memory management is crucial, even for other languages like Rust.

C++'s versatility allows building various software, from video games to web APIs.

C++ is fast due to its low-level abstraction and compilation to machine code.

C++ is used in industries requiring low latency, such as finance.

Low-level abstraction can lead to performance mistakes.

Concepts hidden in higher-level languages are exposed in C++ (e.g., pointers, mutexes).

Understanding these concepts benefits other programming languages.

C++'s long history ensures continued demand.

Reduced number of C++ experts increases its value in the job market.

Large companies like Google, Apple, and Adobe use C++.

C++'s longevity doesn't mean it's outdated.

C++ is standardized and actively developed, with new versions every three years.

Frequent updates can be a double-edged sword, leading to differences between versions.

New features like smart pointers and lambda expressions improve the language.

Tooling is less user-friendly compared to other languages.

Setting up projects with CMake and makefiles can be challenging for beginners.

Dependency management is less streamlined than in other languages.

Benefits of Learning C++ Despite Challenges

Learning C++ improves software engineering skills applicable to other languages.

Understanding memory management improves coding in other languages like JavaScript.