C/C++ Tools

There are several HPC C++ compilers available for x86 (and other platforms) that may well outperform GCC and/or Intel by a significant factor, at least in numerical operations, but GCC and (probably) Intel are the two most heavily used in the Linux world, so I stuck with them.

More than likely, if C++ had the same resources allocated toward it for tool development as Java does, I don't think comparisons like this would even be attempted (or at least published) by the Java cheerleading committee out there in programmer land. Not only would compilers, libaries and runtimes be much better off, but we may even get a bunch of by-golly slick C++ IDE's and RAD tools to work with as well.

The "Java bandwagon" mentality of tool vendors is kind-of depressing when you consider that the number of applications written in C++ (especially for performance sensitive commercial and Open Source code) still far outnumbers Java and more than likely will for several years to come. In other words, most of us rely on code developed with C++ a lot more than Java in our day-to-day grind, but Java is getting a great deal of the resources, not the least of which is because it is one of the current "buzzword" technologies.

Of course, C currently accounts for quite a bit more useful code than C++ and C tools and runtimes benefit from C++ efforts as well. That makes the situation even worse, IMHO - C tool development is closely related to C++ tool development and is currently suffering too.

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