A few weeks ago at the Build conference, Scott Hanselman and I sat down to talk about C++ and modern UI/UX. The podcast is now live here:
The Hanselminutes Podcast, Show #346
“Why C++” with Herb Sutter
Topics Scott raises include:
- 2:00 Scott mentions he has used C++ in the past. C++ has changed. We still call it C++, but it’s a very different language now.
- 5:30 (Why) do we care about performance any more?
- 10:00 What’s this GPGPU thing? Think of your GPU as your modern 80387.
- 13:45 C++ is having a resurgence. Where is C++ big?
- 18:00 Why not just use one language? or, What is C++ good at? Efficient abstraction and portability.
- 21:45 Programmers have a responsibility to support the business. Avoid the pitfall of speeds & feeds.
- 24:00 My experience with my iPad, my iPhone, and my Slate 7 with Win8.
- 28:45 We’re in two election seasons – (a) political and (b) technology (Nexus, iPad Mini, Surface, …). Everyone is wallpapering the media with ads (some of them attack ads), and vying for customer votes/$$, and seeing who’s going to be the winner.
- 35:00 Natural user interfaces – we get so easily used to touch that we paw all screen, and Scott’s son gets so used to saying “Xbox pause” that anything that doesn’t respond is “broken.”
Sutter’s Mill 
I heard the interview it was quite interesting.
One thing that I would like to ask to the list of questions “Why C++” and it goes back to your JIT is not enough post from a long time ago is, if we consider native code generation for languages like Java, C# and so on, how much advantage does C++ still have?
For my point of view just the low level hardware access that usually is not exposed in said languages, right?