Market share of the most used C/C++ IDEs in 2018, statistics and estimates

These are the results of a research study to determine which are the most used C/C++ IDEs in 2018. They include the estimated market share for the top IDEs, but also the estimated number of users and of C/C++ developers in the world.

What are the most used C/C++ IDEs?

I wanted to find out what are the most popular C/C++ IDE, so I decided to run several polls and to collect data to get some answers.

Few weeks and many votes later, these are the top results:

IDE share Visual Studio 28.43% Vim 16.54% Qt Creator 11.64% Visual Studio Code 10.31% CLion 8.91%

As you might have noticed, the second place is hold by Vim, technically a text editor, but many developers use it with (several) plugins as a proper IDE.

The full results including all the entries with at least 1% of votes are showed in this pie chart:

In this chart “others” includes all the entries with less than 1% of votes. Some notable IDEs in this group are C++Builder, CodeLite and NetBeans, whereas some text editors are Atom and Notepad++.

Another way to see the same numbers is using a bar chart, which I believe is easier to read when comparing more than 4-5 options.

Whatever the chart we use, It’s clear that the most used C/C++ IDE is Visual Studio, which holds more market share than the 2 following alternatives.

The distance between Visual Studio and the other IDEs becomes even more clear when excluding all the text editors from the answers:

As before, the same numbers are here available as bar chart:

Visual Studio covers almost more market share than the following 3 IDEs and Microsoft controls over 50% of the market with Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code.

Another interesting number to consider is the amount of people who replied selecting a single choice versus the ones who selected more than one:

Basically 2 out of 3 people (mostly) use a single IDE for their C/C++ development.

Estimating the number of users of each C/C++ IDE

The starting point of this estimate is assuming the total number of software developers is at least 22 millions. That number comes from a study of Evans Data which considers the 40 different countries in 2017.

Using the TIOBE index from 2017, the estimate of C and C++ developers is 3-3.7M. The problem with the TIOBE index is that it’s more an internet popularity index rather than a proper market research. It’s fair to consider it as a lower bound for this estimate.

At the end of 2016, a senior manager of Microsoft said that there are over 1.5M C++ developers using Visual Studio. I am assuming that number includes C developers too. Projecting the market share from my poll gives a total of 5.3M of C/C++ developers.

A research conducted by Jetbrains in 2015 estimated the number of C and C++ developers to be about 6.3M. For sure there is some overlapping between C and C++ developers, but it’s safe to assume 6M as upper bound for this estimate.

Putting all together I believe it’s fair to say that the number of C/C++ developers in the world is around 5.1M.

Now it’s possible to update the results of the poll with some users estimates:

IDE users Visual Studio 1.45M Vim 840K Qt Creator 590K Visual Studio Code 530K CLion 450K

Keep in mind that these are not the numbers of total users for each tool, but only the number of people who use them as C/C++ IDEs.

How good are these numbers?

The polls I have been running collected (valid) entries from 1860 voters.

Which means that statistically, the margin of error of the poll is around 2.99% with a confidence of 99%. That basically means the results shouldn’t be too far from reality.

Most of the data has been collected from the r/cpp community on Reddit. Other sources are Linkedin, Hacker News, Twitter and a couple of forums and Telegram groups dedicated to C++.

Clearly it would have been better having a more heterogeneous distribution of the sources, but on the other hand the majority of the votes should come from actual C/C++ developers and it should reflect the current market accurately enough.

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