2025 was another great year for C++. It shows in the numbers
Before we dive into the data below, let’s put the most important question up front: Why have C++ and Rust been the fastest-growing major programming languages from 2022 to 2025?
Primarily, it’s because throughout the history of computing “software taketh away faster than hardware giveth.” Our demand for solving ever-larger computing problems consistently outstrips our ability to build greater computing capacity, with no end in sight. Every few years, people wonder whether our hardware is just too fast to be useful, until the future’s next big software demand breaks across the industry in a huge wake-up moment of the kind that iOS delivered in 2007 and ChatGPT delivered in November 2022. AI is only the latest source of demand to squeeze the most performance out of available hardware.
The world’s two biggest computing constraints in 2025
Quick quiz: What are the two biggest constraints on computing growth in 2025? What’s in shortest supply?
Take a moment to answer that yourself before reading on…
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If you answered exactly “power and chips,” you’re right — and in the right order.
Chips are only our #2 bottleneck. It’s well known that the hyperscalars are competing hard to get access to chips. That’s why NVIDIA is now the world’s most valuable company, and TSMC is such a behemoth that it’s our entire world’s greatest single point of failure.
But many people don’t realize: Power is the #1 constraint in 2025. Did you notice that all the recent OpenAI deals were expressed in terms of gigawatts? Let’s consider what three C-level executives said on their most recent earnings calls. [1]
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