> Libraries written in C++ or Java can generally only be used by applications written in the same language. It is difficult to get an application written in Haskell or Java to invoke a library written in C++. On the other hand, libraries written in C are callable from any programming language.
Not saying they should have picked C++ but that's a bit untrue. It's quite easy given some thought into the API to invoke C++ code in basically any language which can invoke C code, since you can wrap a C++ implementation in a C interface. I've done it multiple time throughout my career (that ended up being called from Python, Swift, Objective-C/C++, Swift, Java, and Kotlin).
And as a side note, you don't have to do object-oriented programming in C++ if you don't want to.
Not saying they should have picked C++ but that's a bit untrue. It's quite easy given some thought into the API to invoke C++ code in basically any language which can invoke C code, since you can wrap a C++ implementation in a C interface. I've done it multiple time throughout my career (that ended up being called from Python, Swift, Objective-C/C++, Swift, Java, and Kotlin).
And as a side note, you don't have to do object-oriented programming in C++ if you don't want to.