Will Learning C++ Help for Building Fast/No-Additional-Requirements Desktop Applications? [closed]

Question

Will learning C++ help me build native applications with good speed? Will it help me as a programmer, and what are the other benefits?

The reason why I want to learn C++ is because I'm disappointed with the UI performances of applications built on top of JVM and .NET. They feel slow, and start slow too. Of course, a really bad programmer can create a slower and sluggish application using C++ too, but I'm not considering that case.

One of my favorite Windows utility application is Launchy. And in the Readme.pdf file, the author of the program wrote this:

0.6 This is the first C++ release. As I became frustrated with C#’s large .NET framework requirements and users lack of desire to install it, I decided to switch back to the faster language.

I totally agree with the author of Launchy about the .NET framework requirement or even a JRE requirement for desktop applications. Let alone the specific version of them. And some of the best and my favorite desktop applications don't need .NET or Java to run. They just run after installing. Are they mostly built using C++? Is C++ the only option for good and fast GUI based applications?

And, I'm also very interested in hearing the other benefits of learning C++.

Answer 1

yep, C++ is absolutely great. Check Qt. It has a great Python binding too, so you can easily prototype in Python, and when/if you need extra performance, porting to C++ is a mostly 1:1 translation.

But in fact, writing C++ isn't so hard either when you have a great platform, the worst part is writing all the class declarations :-)

Answer 2

If you want to build Windows applications that will run without frameworks such as .NET or virtual machines/interpreters, then your only really viable choices are going to be Visual Basic or C/C++

I've written some small Windows apps before in C++ code, and there is definitely a benefit in terms of speed and ease of deployment, at the expense of difficulty going up for development. C++ can be very fast, natively compiles, has many modern language features, and wide support. The trade off is that it's likely that you'll need to write more code in certain situations, or seek out libraries like Boost that provide the functionality you're after.

As a programmer, working in C++ and especially in C is good experience for helping you understand something just a tad closer to the machine than say, .NET, Java or a scripting language like VBScript, Python, Perl etc. It won't necessarily make you a better programmer, but if you are open to learning new lessons from it you may find that it helps you gain a new perspective on software. After all, most of the frameworks and systems you depend on are written in pure C, so it will never hurt you to understand the foundations. C++ is a different animal from straight C, but if you develop in C++ for Windows you'll likely find yourself working in a mix of C and C++ to work with Windows APIs, so it will have a trickle-down effect.