Sutter's BeCPP keynote: C++ added more developers in 4 years than any other language
Herb Sutter’s BeCPP Symposium keynote (video, Howest, March 30 2026) opened with a chart that has been quietly travelling through C++ Slack channels for the past six weeks. SlashData’s Q1 2025 Developer Population report puts C++ at 16.3M developers, up from 9.5M in Q1 2022 — a 72% gain in three years. JavaScript is still #1 at 28.0M. But here is the line everyone in the room reposted on the way out:
“There are more C++ developers today than the #1 language had four years ago.”
That is one slide, two numbers. The interesting part is what those numbers do (and do not) mean.
The chart in plain numbers
SlashData polls developers globally each quarter. The 2025 State of the Developer Nation puts the top of the league table like this (Q1 2025, sized in millions):
| # | Language | Q1 2025 | Q1 2022 | Net add | % growth (3y) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | JavaScript | 28.0 | ~22 | +6.0 | ~27% |
| 2 | Java | 23.2 | ~16 | +7.2 | ~45% |
| 3 | Python | 22.9 | ~16 | +6.9 | ~43% |
| 4 | C++ | 16.3 | ~9.5 | +6.8 | 72% |
| 5 | PHP | 11.5 | — | — | — |
| 6 | C# | 11.1 | — | — | — |
| 7 | C | 9.1 | ~5.2 | +3.9 | ~75% |
| 11 | Rust | 5.1 | ~2.1 | +3.0 | 137% |
(Q1 2022 totals reconstructed from SlashData’s annual deltas. The chart shape, growth-arrow callouts, and the 16.3M C++ figure are directly from the deck Sutter showed; older quarters are estimated from the bars in slide 5.)
Two honest reads of this table, both true:
- Rust grew fastest in percentage: 137% over three years. If your prior was “Rust is rising rapidly”, the data backs it.
- C++ grew fastest in absolute developer count among the perf/Watt-honest languages: +6.8M added in three years. JavaScript added similar absolute numbers, but it started 13M ahead. The languages targeting durable perf-per-Watt — Sutter’s framing — are C, C++, and Rust, and C++ added more developers in absolute terms than C and Rust combined.
The “fastest growing” headline depends on which axis you privilege. Sutter, unsurprisingly, leans on the absolute one. The slide title was “We’re growing gangbusters for a reason.”
The thesis Sutter hung off the data
The second slide that got the room’s attention came near the end. The reasoning chain:
- Compute demand keeps outstripping supply. “The size of new computing problems we want to solve has routinely outstripped our computing capacity and human developer supply for the past 80 years — I know of no reason why that would change in the next 80.” (slide 37)
- Perf-per-Watt is the durable language axis. Hardware scaling is hitting physics; the languages whose runtime cost stays close to the metal will keep paying off as workloads grow.
- The list of general-purpose languages targeting that axis is short: C, C++, Rust. (DSLs, ASICs, FPGAs always get used at the leading edge — they fill the gaps between general-purpose runs.)
- Therefore the developer-population data is a downstream signal of (1) + (2) + (3). Languages that map onto the durable perf-per-Watt thesis get a steady tailwind. Java and Python grew fast in absolute numbers because they sit on enormous app + data ecosystems; C++, Rust, and C grew because the compute thesis demands the metal.
That is a tendentious reading — it is a C++ keynote — but it is internally consistent and the data does fit it.
What the data does NOT say
Three things worth being honest about, since this chart is going to be quoted out of context:
- It is not “C++ overtook X”. JavaScript is still bigger by 11M developers; Java by 7M; Python by 7M. C++ closed the gap on the trio above it; it did not pass any of them.
- It is not “Rust is shrinking” or “Rust is in trouble”. Rust’s 137% growth on a 2.1M base is a stronger signal of language health than C++‘s 72% on a 9.5M base. The two stories are complementary, not competing.
- SlashData polls the developer population, not lines of code or new project starts. A polled figure is “do you write C++ at least sometimes” — not “is C++ your primary language” or “did you start a new C++ project this year”. The number is real but it is a coarser signal than commit graphs.
So what does this mean for the C++ work in 2026?
If you are picking C++ for a new system, the population data is one more data point that the talent pool is growing, not shrinking. If you are arguing internally that “C++ is dying”, the chart is a hard rebuttal — 6.8M developers added in three years is not a dying language. If you are building tooling, libraries, or training material in this space, the demand signal is favourable.
The wro.cpp angle: the Memory safety in C++26 and beyond toolset entry, the Hardened standard library entry, and the reflection-driven schema lints all sit on top of this thesis. C++ is moving fast on safety and ergonomics because the population of developers shipping production C++ is moving fast. The keynote is worth the 60 minutes if you have not seen it yet.
Read next: the vector-consteval / constexpr news short for the C++26 + reflection-flavoured side, or the april-2026 roundup for the rest of last month’s reflection-arc news.