C++ still shining in language popularity index

The language grew nearly 6% year over year in Tiobe's index and ranks fifth on PYPL's popularity index.

Editor at Large, InfoWorld |

C++ still shining in language popularity index
Ambreen Hasan (CC0)

C++, already established as a rising star in the Tiobe programming language popularity index, continues to make great strides so far in 2023.

The language scored an increase of 5.93% this month over the same time last year, far ahead of all other languages, software quality services vendor Tiobe said. In January, C++ won the Tiobe Programming Language of the Year designation for 2022, awarded to the language experiencing the most growth in Tiobe’s index. C++ is favored for developing applications requiring capabilities of the C language but for large software systems, Tiobe said. The founder of C++, Bjarne Stroustrup, recently cited uses ranging from aerospace to artificial intelligence/machine learning to biomedicine.

The Tiobe index bases language popularity on a formula assessing searches on languages in popular search engines such as Bing, Yahoo, and Google, specifically monitoring the number of courses, skilled engineers, and third-party vendors pertinent to a language. The two new booming languages in the index’s Top 20 were Rust, positioned for safety and high performance and growing at 0.16% year over year, and Scratch, meant for beginners in elementary and secondary schools and growing at 0.13% year over year. Scratch was the 18th-ranked language and Rust was 20th this month. As far as established languages, C ranked second in the index and grew 1.3% year over year, while Java ranked fourth and grew 1.07% year over year in February. Visual Basic ranked sixth and grew 1.09%.

The Top 10 in Tiobe’s index for February 2023

  1. Python, with a rating of 15.49%
  2. C, 15.39%
  3. C++, 13.94%
  4. Java, 13.21%
  5. C#, 6.38%
  6. Visual Basic, 4.14%
  7. JavaScript, 2.52%
  8. SQL, 2.12%
  9. Assembly, 1.38%
  10. PHP, 1.29%

PYPL Popularity of Programming Language Index

The rival PYPL Popularity of Programming Language Index, which analyzes how often language tutorials are searched in Google, has the following as its top 10 for this month:

  1. Python, 27.7% share
  2. Java, 16.79%
  3. JavaScript, 9.65%
  4. C#, 6.97%
  5. C/C++, 6.87%
  6. PHP, 5.23%
  7. R, 4.11%
  8. TypeScript, 2.83%
  9. Swift, 2.27%
  10. Objective-C, 2.25%

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Paul Krill is an editor at large at InfoWorld, whose coverage focuses on application development.

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