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Believe me, those who truly believe that C++ is great, consider some of those deficiencies to be advantages.

It helps to remember, that C and C++ don't exist on an "VM island", i.e. as an isolated process, like all high-level programming languages do. They are effectively extensions of UNIX-derived operating systems, i.e. they run under "UNIX VM". They even have a garbage collection of sorts: when you exit the program, the memory gets freed. And, according to Linux philosophy, launching processes or forking/dying should be quick, efficient and, in fact, desirable. Also, having many independent binary modules is the norm, so here is your runtime encapsulation.

But C family is still the only tool out there that allows you to extend an OS, i.e. for instance to build a piece of code, a single instance of which will be serving all other simultaneously running processes. This explains why Apache eats so little RAM. None of VM-based languages can do that. It's called systems programming.

Building a web-based CRM in C++ is stupid. Building a filesystem in Python is impossible.




You wouldn't build a low level filesystem in Python, however, Tahoe is a distributed file system built using python:

http://allmydata.org/~warner/pycon-tahoe.html


I don't know. Every time RoR slows down under barely any load, I swear to myself that I'm going to right C++ on Rails and do it right.


It's nginx that eats so little RAM. Apache is a huge!


And nginx is written in C




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