C++ Renaissance Here Due To WinRT C++/CX ?

[d000hg]

That's fair, but then who doesn't want more battery life from their tablet/smartphone/laptop? Even a desktop PC will suck more electricity because of inefficient software. Yes optimising everything isn't generally worth the cost, but that's not the point. The point is if everything else is 50/50 you may as well choose the efficient option.

It's interesting that a resurgence of interest in C++ comes from the two ends of the spectrum... data-centres and mobile devices.

I don't think the savings in power for a desktop or even laptop are really worth bothering about in this context, because the difference in electricity is pennies and also, your laptop is probably sitting idle 90% of the time even if you're typing.

In data centres, you're utilising (or trying to) your hardware 100% so if you can make the code 10% more efficient, that's a big deal when the same code runs on thousands of servers... in big enough setups even custom-designing your own hardware is cost-effective.

On mobile, all we've basically done is set the clock back a decade in away. The first generations of smartphones were low-power and it meant suddenly all those old tricks for optimisation became import again. As a games developer, it was/is interesting to read loads of stuff that I learned before 3D accelerators was suddenly current again.
However, mobile performance is increasing at a stupendous rate. A modern smartphone is more powerful than a desktop PC was a decade ago now.

I think the return to native code on mobile platforms might be short-lived, because as the hardware improves, we'll have the same situation as we did on PCs where we didn't need to optimise any more. Whereas in the data centre, probably the opposite will happen as the number of servers grows and grows. BUT, the number of people operating on that scale will remain small. FaceBook can decide to rewrite PHP as a static compiler but for 99% of the rest of us, regular PHP on a cheap VM will do just fine