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I can answer only for my own account, but for starting a new project in late 2013 december, and now been working for it the past two years, related to custom geometry generated in VR, C++ was the only viable crossplatform option.

With C++ (using the C++11 standard) I can assure pretty sure that the code compiles on Mac, Linux, Windows, Android, iOS and pretty much every platform.

With the VR -platform we also need all the performance we can get, because target FPS is 90 on a stereo rendering sized area.

Also, library support, existing code to use and so on all win here.

Definitely C++ is not the most nice language to get into, Objective-C for example is much nicer IMO. But the more you use C++, the more nicer it gets as you learn the ropes more and more. It's a very complex language, but knowing it pays off in the long run, and the modern C++11 and C++14 are a completely different beast than the previous implementations in terms of ease of usage and code syntax niceness.

So, crossplatform is a big thing. If I would write it in C#, it would be tied to either Microsofts C# or the Mono implementation. If I would have chosen Obj-C, it would be pretty much Mac and iOS only.

When you need performance + crossplatform, C++ just wins.




However that is a consequence of available implementations, not of the language itself.

Back in the day, I went Turbo Pascal -> C++ exactly for that reason (Turbo Pascal -> C was never an option).

If the UNIX systems I had to work with, had a Turbo Pascal compatible compiler, I would kept using it.


Well, partly yes. If this was year 2030 and Rust was available on every platform so that everything worked perfectly, I would have probably used that.




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