C++: The Documentary

> It's not so simple that you can just declare what is surprising.

On the contrary, of course I can tell you that I was surprised and I'm far from alone. The fact you immediately grasped for "real world" comparisons ought to tell you that you're not thinking about this correctly because these are software sorts and so have very different affordances than the real world.

The claim that you wanted control doesn't make sense in the context of C++. There are in place stable sorts - the bubble sort you may have seen in class years ago is one, but C++ doesn't promise one in its standard library. However it does provide an unstable sort, which it just names "sort" and that's what I'm pointing at as a problem.

As to the "absolute fastest" you're in the wrong place if you've used a generic comparison sort expecting the "absolute fastest". For the machine integers it's usually not even the correct category of sort for "absolute fastest". But the C++ standard library is the wrong place to look even if you did need a generic comparison sort, because so much crap C++ exists and maintainers are scared to change anything for fear of what may happen.

Did you know libc++ didn't even have a guaranteed O(N log N) sort until the Joe Biden presidency? The introsort paper was written last century and the C++ standard itself did finally incorporate this basic requirement in 2011, but it took another decade for the Clang team to fix this.

Hi, I'm a Principal Market Research Consultant with SlashData. We've been around for more than 15 years, and we work with the largest organisations in tech when it comes our market research on developers (our client page include AWS, Google, Microsoft, LF, Cisco, and so on and so on). Not bragging, but trying to assuage concerns that we are some fly-by-night org that popped up out of nowhere.

The makers of the documentary reached out to us to use our footage in the report and Bjarne has also used our report/blog when talking about the future of C++. In general, our hypothesis about its continued relevance is in line with what the documentary itself reports: developer numbers have grown massively and C++ has a very specific series of use cases that maintain its relevance.

Our methodology page is lengthy, but it can be summarised by the combination of several pieces of distinct information. We have labour statistics from various national governments to provide reference points, we use statistics from areas developers associate with (e.g. StackOverflow or GitHub) and compare against responses from inside the survey, and our own build-up of numbers based on the proportional data from within the survey (region, age, area, development, etc.). We have been doing this for many years. We also acknowledge in our reports that we are confident in all regions, but with greater uncertainty in the Greater China region, as we are a non-Chinese firm, so we have to work with partners in the region which minimises our confidence in the region.

The report lists the numbers for the major leading languages, basically any language that is used in multiple areas of development and has more than 500k users, give or take. It is not a perfect measure approach but it is about giving the most useful information at the highest level. We also exclude things like SQL because they are nor programming languages, unlike most of the other measures.

For the report, we typically have blogs available with similar information, but our free reports are designed for lead generation, which is why emails are asked for.