Devops

Language’s popularity continues to grow despite commonly cited frustrations

The Standard C++ Foundation’s annual developer survey shows AI use among C++ programmers is rising fast, though mistrust and resistance remain stubbornly high.

The poll, billed as a “10-minute survey to help inform C++ standardization and C++ tool vendors,” drew 1,434 respondents, 38 percent more than last year. It likely reflects the views of developers most engaged with C++ and its evolution, rather than the wider C++ community.

That supposition is confirmed by a question on what type of projects respondents work on, with more than 26 percent saying they work on developer tools such as compilers and code editors – higher than one would expect. 60.5 percent of respondents say they have more than 10 years’ experience developing with C++, and 32.7 percent more than 20 years, so this is a mature crowd.

A key point of interest is what has changed since last year, with AI the most notable example. 39.8 percent of respondents use AI for writing code frequently, versus 30.9 percent last year. There is also more use of AI for other tasks such as writing tests (up from 20 to 33 percent) and for debugging (up from 11.5 to 23.6 percent).

That said, there is also notable resistance to AI. 42 percent (down from 52.7 percent last year) rarely or never use AI for coding or other tasks. Issues with AI (among both adopters and non-adopters) include incorrect output, lack of trust in the output, data privacy concerns, and the cost of AI tools.

Several of the survey questions invite write-in responses, which to our annoyance are not published but sent only to members of the standards committee and product vendors. An AI-generated summary is published instead.

Issues with AI, according to this summary, include struggles with large projects and complex build systems. Some write-ins had stronger language, including claims that AI is “burning the planet.”

When asked what developers would like to change about C++, the themes, again according to a summary, are similar to those mentioned last year, including the lack of a standard package manager; the complexity of managing headers, includes, and macros; long build times; bugs from undefined behavior and implicit conversions; lack of memory safety; obscure error messages from tools; and gaps in the standard library forcing use of third-party libraries.

Respondents valued the ISO/WG21 C++ standards committee as essential and transparent, but it also came under fire for slow progress and over-complex language design – perhaps with some contradiction since respondents want it both to do more and to do less.

C++ remains among the most popular programming languages. A recent language survey from RedMonk ranks it in seventh place, or sixth if you do not count CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), behind JavaScript, Python, Java, C#, and TypeScript. Rust, often put forward as a safer alternative, lies in 20th place. Last year, SlashData claimed that C++ has “grown from 9.4 million developers in 2022 to 16.3 million in 2025,” a figure quoted by former standards committee chair Herb Sutter, who said that C++, C, and Rust are growing because of their hardware efficiency, “performance per watt.”

At the same time, there is widespread dissatisfaction with C++, shown not only by the comments in surveys like this one, but by projects like Google’s Carbon, a proposed “successor language” whose README refers to the “accumulating decades of technical debt” in C++ and claims that “incrementally improving C++ is extremely difficult, both due to the technical debt itself and challenges with its evolution process.”

The Carbon team hopes to ship a “working 0.1 language for evaluation” by the end of 2026 at the earliest; it will be controversial and a long way from production-ready.

In the meantime, C++ usage shows no sign of decline despite the fact that many developers will readily reel off a list of its faults and problems. ®

Two U.S. nationals were sentenced to 18 months in prison for running laptop farms that facilitated North Korea’s expansive remote IT workers scheme, the Justice Department said Wednesday.

Matthew Issac Knoot and Erick Ntekereze Prince both received and hosted laptops at their residences to dupe U.S. companies into thinking remote IT workers they hired were located in the country. The pair’s separate schemes impacted almost 70 U.S. companies and generated a combined $1.2 million in revenue for the North Korean regime.

“The FBI and our partners will continue to disrupt North Korea’s ability to circumvent sanctions and fund its totalitarian regime,” Brett Leatherman, lead of the FBI’s Cyber Division, said in a statement. “These cases should leave no doubt that Americans who choose to facilitate these schemes will be identified and held accountable. Hosting laptops for DPRK IT workers is a federal crime which directly impacts our national security, and these sentences should serve as a warning to anyone considering it.”

Knoot, of Nashville, Tennessee, and Prince, of New York, received the laptops from unsuspecting U.S. companies and installed remote desktop applications on the machines to enable co-conspirators to work from anywhere while appearing to be based at their respective residences.

Prince’s company Taggcar was contracted to supply IT workers to victim U.S. companies from June 2020 through August 2024. He pleaded guilty in November 2025 to wire fraud conspiracy for his yearslong involvement in the North Korean IT worker scheme. 

Prince was indicted and charged in January 2025 along with his alleged co-conspirators, who collectively obtained work for North Korean IT workers at 64 U.S. companies, earning nearly $950,000 in salary payments. 

A federal judge sentenced Prince Wednesday and ordered him to forfeit $89,000, which is the amount he netted personally. 

Knoot was arrested in August 2024, a year after the FBI searched his home. Officials said he made multiple false and misleading statements and destroyed evidence to obstruct the investigation at that time. 

Victim companies paid North Korean workers linked to Knoot’s laptop farm more than $250,000 from July 2022 to August 2023. The remote IT workers transferred those funds to Knoot and accounts associated with North Korean and Chinese nationals, officials said. 

Knoot was sentenced May 1 and ordered to pay $15,1000 in restitution to the victim companies and forfeit an additional $15,100, which is equivalent to the amount of his direct take from the scheme.

The pair of North Korean operatives join a growing list of people who have been charged and jailed for supporting the regime’s scheme that generates hundreds of millions of dollars annually for the country’s military and organizations involved in its weapons programs.

Authorities have been cracking down on the malicious insider activity by seizing cryptocurrency linked to the theft, and targeting U.S.-based facilitators who provided forged or stolen identities and hosted laptop farms for North Korean operatives. 

The countermeasures are stacking up, but the scheme is widespread and has infiltrated an undetermined number of businesses, including hundreds of Fortune 500 companies.

Federal judges previously sentenced other people to prison for their involvement in the scheme, including Keija Wang and Zhenxing Wang; Audricus Phagnasay, Jason Salazar and Alexander Paul Travis; Oleksandr Didenko and Christina Chapman. 

“These sentences hold accountable U.S nationals who enabled North Korea’s illicit efforts to infiltrate U.S. networks and profit on the back of U.S. companies,” John A. Eisenberg, assistant attorney general for national security, said in a statement. 

“These defendants helped North Korean ‘IT workers’ masquerade as legitimate employees, compromising U.S. corporate networks and helping generate revenue for a heavily sanctioned and rogue regime,” he added. “The National Security Division will continue to pursue those who, through deception and cyber-enabled fraud, threaten our national security.”