Also, one of the most popular web frameworks for Python started off as an April Fools joke. I'm not sure what's your point.
Lastly, the main reason why C++ ceased to be the most popular choice in some domains was because it was during a very long time the most popular choice in some domains, and still remains one of the most popular choices. Some of the reasons why C++ dropped in popularity is the fact that some vendors decided to roll their own alternatives while removing support for C++. Take for instance Microsoft, which was once responsible for making C++ the only tool in town for professional software development. Since it started pushing C# for all sorts of web applications, multi-platform applications, and even desktop applications, and also pushing the adoption of those technologies as a basic requirement to distribute apps in its app store, developers can only use technologies that exist. But does that say anything about the merits of C++?
Over time, it became less important for C++ to be a good general-purpose language. When performance of idiomatic C++ is good enough, using C++ is often a bad idea: it delivers comparable performance to C# or Java, but it’s more expensive to use. While technically C++ has desktop GUI frameworks, web frameworks and others, they aren’t hugely popular: due to development costs, people typically prefer higher level memory safe languages for that stuff.
For use cases like videogames, HPC and similar, C++ has very little competition, because that level of performance is borderline impossible to achieve in other languages. It’s for these use cases people care about costs of malloc, cache-friendly RAM access patterns, and other things which are less than ideal in idiomatic C++.
Ironically Microsoft is the only OS vendor for mainstream platforms that still ships a GUI SDK that gives tier 1 treatment to C++ with WinUI, and even then the tooling is really clunky (back to VC++ 6.0 COM days).
On the Apple and Google side that ship has long sailed, with C++ used only on the lower OS levels, and as basis for MSL.
Naturally there are still the GUIs for game consoles left (although XBox dashboard uses React Native, with the previous generation being UWP, PS 4 famously used WebGL), and special purpose embedded devices.
This is a discussion on C++.
> People mostly stopped using C++ to develop web servers which handle web requests, because they moved to Java, C#, PHP, Ruby, Python, etc.
I'm not sure you understood what I said, or thought things through.
By the way, the top performing web framework in the Tech Empower benchmark is a C++ framework which uses C++'s standard smart pointers.
https://github.com/drogonframework/drogon
Also, one of the most popular web frameworks for Python started off as an April Fools joke. I'm not sure what's your point.
Lastly, the main reason why C++ ceased to be the most popular choice in some domains was because it was during a very long time the most popular choice in some domains, and still remains one of the most popular choices. Some of the reasons why C++ dropped in popularity is the fact that some vendors decided to roll their own alternatives while removing support for C++. Take for instance Microsoft, which was once responsible for making C++ the only tool in town for professional software development. Since it started pushing C# for all sorts of web applications, multi-platform applications, and even desktop applications, and also pushing the adoption of those technologies as a basic requirement to distribute apps in its app store, developers can only use technologies that exist. But does that say anything about the merits of C++?