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There seems to be a growing interest in the 35 year old C++ programming language. The language has risen to third place in the Tiobe index for April this year, writes ZDNet. Tiobe’s index shows how popular a language is among programmers.

C++ was created in 1985 as an extension of the C programming language. The latest standardized version, C++17, has support from a range of large C++ compilers. These include Microsoft Visual Studio, GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) and Clang.

Now it appears that the popularity of the programming language is rising again. In Tiobe’s ratings, the language has a share of 8.83 percent, 1.62 percentage points more than in the same month last year. The ratings are based on results in Google, Bing, Yahoo, Wikipedia, YouTube and Baidu.

It managed to take Python’s place this month. Python has become very popular among developers in recent years. According to Tiobe analysts, the fact that C++ has now taken Python’s place does not mean that Python will become less popular. This month, the language has a share of 8.166 percent, which is an increase of 2.36 percentage points compared to last year.

According to Tiobe, the top ten languages of April are Java, C, C++, Python, Visual Basic .NET, C#, JavaScript, SQL, PHP and Assembly Language.

Old status

With the increasing popularity of C++, however, C++ is not yet back at the same point as at the beginning of the 00’s. At that time it had a market share of more than 15 percent. According to Tiobe, the lower score of today is due to “the complexity and the delay in releasing the new language definition C++0x”. “This new language standard, which was eventually called C++11 after its release in 2011, made the language much simpler, safer and more expressive.

In addition, it took a few more years for the C++11 standard to be adopted, as the community had to wait for compilers to support the language. This is now the case, making the language more popular again. There will also be a new version: C++20. This version should be finished this year.

This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.