All our infrastructure technology, services, and almost all “applications” we have built are written in C++. That’s millions of lines of code and span everything from IR, distributed storage and computation, ads serving, relational and columnar datastores, caching and much more.
It’s about velocity and experience. Language rarely matters ( and when it does, you can use what’s appropriate ). For us, C++ checks all the boxes.
Above, you wrote <<velocity>>. Most people would say that C++ has lower velocity than other higher order languages, like C#, Java, Python, Ruby, etc. You also include the term <<experience>> which is a curious combination. In my professional experience, language "experience" dominates most discussions about what langauge to use for a new project. After all, programmers are humans who have biases from their (programming) langauge experience. (Zero trolling on the last sentence!)
Velocity is about familiarity, about expressiveness, about being able to quickly translating what you want to accomplish to code. It’s also about, for me anyway, not being constrained by inherent limits of the language or runtimes. Like I said, checks all the boxes.
As for experience, I have been writing C since the very early nineties and moved on to c++ soon thereafter.
Again, all that is, for the most part anyway, not specific to this language.
It’s about velocity and experience. Language rarely matters ( and when it does, you can use what’s appropriate ). For us, C++ checks all the boxes.