&gt; I imagine game developers are the few people left using C++. Does this come down to not being able to get around pauses in garbage collection?<p>That is one reason. But if you watch OP&#x27;s video, you&#x27;ll see a lot of other reasons. In particular, games frequently have their own allocators &amp; memory management. This is one reason why it might be hard, inconvenient, or impossible to use Java or C#.<p>That said, a lot of gameplay logic these days is actually written in a scripting language like Lua, and C++ is used for lower level systems like rendering &amp; physics.<p>&gt; In 2015, starting from scratch, where is C++ needed?<p>The main question is: &quot;starting what&quot;? For most web dev, you&#x27;d be crazy to start with C++. For the internals of a game engine, like unreal or unity or a competitor, C++ is probably the only sane choice. Also anything embedded. I guess Arduino &amp; others are getting interpreters now, but C&#x2F;C++ (notably minus the crazy kind of stuff in the video) is the easiest way to start.<p>I used to do hobby projects in C++, mainly graphics &amp; image processing. My reasons were I knew it, it compiled to very fast code compared to anything else, and it was often the easiest way to interface with whatever open source libraries I needed.<p>These days most libraries are available in your favorite scripting language, and the performance can be good if you pay attention. I don&#x27;t personally have a reason to use C++ anymore, even for hobby projects that need high performance.