how can you know what programming language was used to make an app?

I want to know what my favorite software( s ) was coded on

 

Watch its startup:
Does it load some shared libraries (e.g. MSVC++ DLLs)?
Does it load/initialize some runtime (e.g. .NET/CLR, Go's runtime)?
You can disassemble it - some instructions that are similar to some lang's standard library?

You can use program that can detect the linker used (if it's not Microsoft, GNU or LLVM one, you can guess, e.g. Borland -> maybe Delphi or C++).

 

In windows, pretty much everything is coded in C++ OR C# but there are many compilers and frameworks. The most complex programs when it comes to GUIs (I bet Cubase is one of 'em) use C# pretty much because MSoft forces to use it when using advanced Visual Studio features.

Visual Studio is the program to develop programs, the compiler it uses is MSoft MSVC for C++ but there's another for C# code which is pseudo-compiled like Java. That means there's an interpreter which run the programs. C# code by design and in practice monopoly performs very well in Windows.

I'm not mentioning the compilers because @CDLF has explained them very well.

There's also Java, you'll find pretty much always (sometimes "hidden") .jar packages.

Both C# and Java can interact with C++ explicitly or implicitly.

There are cross platform C++ frameworks. Especially Qt, I'm almost sure Live is coded using Qt partially (just look Qt*.dll in your system drive). But Qt has only basic audio support, the hard part goes all the the ableton programmers.

There's the current winner framework for coding plugins which is JUCE. It uses vector fonts (MIDI Guitar 2).

When it comes to libraries for specific tasks, the number-crunching winner is Intel MKL (you can search the dll files also, like in Amplitube). But lately the Intel libraries that perform better are the ones that you include when coding (Intel IPP, let's says is a library you use before compiling to a program), that means the name of the final program files can be different.

 

Last edited: Dec 4, 2018