Devops

Language's popularity continues to grow despite commonly cited frustrations

The Standard C++ Foundation's annual developer survey shows AI use among C++ programmers is rising fast, though mistrust and resistance remain stubbornly high.

The poll, billed as a “10-minute survey to help inform C++ standardization and C++ tool vendors,” drew 1,434 respondents, 38 percent more than last year. It likely reflects the views of developers most engaged with C++ and its evolution, rather than the wider C++ community.

That supposition is confirmed by a question on what type of projects respondents work on, with more than 26 percent saying they work on developer tools such as compilers and code editors – higher than one would expect. 60.5 percent of respondents say they have more than 10 years' experience developing with C++, and 32.7 percent more than 20 years, so this is a mature crowd.

A key point of interest is what has changed since last year, with AI the most notable example. 39.8 percent of respondents use AI for writing code frequently, versus 30.9 percent last year. There is also more use of AI for other tasks such as writing tests (up from 20 to 33 percent) and for debugging (up from 11.5 to 23.6 percent).

That said, there is also notable resistance to AI. 42 percent (down from 52.7 percent last year) rarely or never use AI for coding or other tasks. Issues with AI (among both adopters and non-adopters) include incorrect output, lack of trust in the output, data privacy concerns, and the cost of AI tools.

Several of the survey questions invite write-in responses, which to our annoyance are not published but sent only to members of the standards committee and product vendors. An AI-generated summary is published instead.

Issues with AI, according to this summary, include struggles with large projects and complex build systems. Some write-ins had stronger language, including claims that AI is "burning the planet."

When asked what developers would like to change about C++, the themes, again according to a summary, are similar to those mentioned last year, including the lack of a standard package manager; the complexity of managing headers, includes, and macros; long build times; bugs from undefined behavior and implicit conversions; lack of memory safety; obscure error messages from tools; and gaps in the standard library forcing use of third-party libraries.

Respondents valued the ISO/WG21 C++ standards committee as essential and transparent, but it also came under fire for slow progress and over-complex language design – perhaps with some contradiction since respondents want it both to do more and to do less.

C++ remains among the most popular programming languages. A recent language survey from RedMonk ranks it in seventh place, or sixth if you do not count CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), behind JavaScript, Python, Java, C#, and TypeScript. Rust, often put forward as a safer alternative, lies in 20th place. Last year, SlashData claimed that C++ has "grown from 9.4 million developers in 2022 to 16.3 million in 2025," a figure quoted by former standards committee chair Herb Sutter, who said that C++, C, and Rust are growing because of their hardware efficiency, "performance per watt."

At the same time, there is widespread dissatisfaction with C++, shown not only by the comments in surveys like this one, but by projects like Google's Carbon, a proposed "successor language" whose README refers to the "accumulating decades of technical debt" in C++ and claims that "incrementally improving C++ is extremely difficult, both due to the technical debt itself and challenges with its evolution process."

The Carbon team hopes to ship a "working 0.1 language for evaluation" by the end of 2026 at the earliest; it will be controversial and a long way from production-ready.

In the meantime, C++ usage shows no sign of decline despite the fact that many developers will readily reel off a list of its faults and problems. ®