Stroustrup fires back: complexity is the price of power, deal with it

The man who wrote C++ just called the industry's bluff. While half the developer population chases the next zero-code unicorn, Bjarne Stroustrup shrugs: if nobody is complaining about your language, congratulations, it's probably irrelevant.

Speaking to a handful of reporters after his keynote at the CppCon Asia satellite in Singapore, the 73-year-old Danish computer scientist dismantled the yearly ritual of crowning the easiest stack. Python fanboys, Rust evangelists, JavaScript magicians—he lumped them together in two buckets. Bucket one: languages everybody whines about yet runs the planet. Bucket two: languages so pristine they never leave GitHub stargazer limbo.

The myth of disappearing code

AI pair-programming tools now spit whole classes before you finish the prompt. Stroustrup's response? "Incorporating that auto-slop verbatim is unacceptable and, frankly, embarrassing." Translation: generated snippets age like milk inside large, long-lived codebases where an off-by-one error can brick a power grid. The closer you get to silicon—think game engines, OS kernels, trading firmware—the more you pay for every concealed byte and nanosecond. That's the moat C++ keeps defending, ugliness included.

He underlined a figure that rarely surfaces in boot-camp brochures: 4 billion new lines of C++ are compiled into production every week, much of it inside browsers, databases and rockets. The language's surface area is monstrous—templates, undefined behavior, ABI fragility—but cancelling that complexity would also erase the knobs engineers twist when latency budgets drop to micros and determinism equals lives.

Simplicity can be a straitjacket

Modern "easy" stacks look sleek on a slide until you profile them under load. A Python service that feels snappy with 100 users turns into a garbage-collected swamp at 10,000. JavaScript's event loop glues together NPM modules the size of node_modules, itself a black-hole directory that can outweigh the actual payload. "Dependencies become liabilities at scale," Stroustrup noted. C++ ships most of its muscle statically, no interpreter, no VM, no 300-MB runtime shipping a left-pad function.

The upshot is a Darwinian split. If your start-up optimises for time-to-pivot, a forgiving language buys runway. If your product must stay up when the NYSE ticks or when a Mars injection burn fires, you need the chainsaw C++ hands you—complete with safety goggles and the occasional severed limb.

Perfection is the enemy of uptime

Stroustrup closed with a line he has recycled for decades yet still stings: "There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses." The quip sounds flip until you realise it is a tautology carved into the side of every long-lived codebase. Utility breeds scars. Scars attract complaints. Complaints, if addressed judiciously, harden into the next revision. Repeat for 40 years and you get C++23, still ugly, still indispensable.

So the next time an LLM promises to retire entire engineering disciplines, remember the 4-billion-line-per-week refutation in production right now. Complexity never disappeared; it just moved address. Stroustrup's wager is that someone, somewhere, will always want to look the machine square in the eye and tell it exactly what to do—no runtime, apologies or second chances.