Looking at public repos for stats is like counting the number of tables on planet earth by looking at satellite photos. You never see inside the buildings, just whats outside in parks etc.

It powers your OS, your VM instance running your flashy new CRUD app, your network protocols, your game engines, your browser, the interpreter or compiler you use to run your high level languages, and much, much more.

Programs such as these need high performance, low level access to hardware, or the ability to manage resources in a custom way. Languages like C, and C++ are very well suited for this. Sure, I wouldn't write a web-app in C++, but then again, I wouldn't write a javascript jit-compiler in javascript (okay maybe in asm.js for kicks).

Personally, when I see the growth of higher-level languages like these, I don't attribute it to the fall of low-level languages, but instead to the availability of new languages good for certain tasks.

In 2014, we have the luxury of being able to write applications at higher levels of abstraction, and this is a good thing. But tools like C, and C++ are still, and will be widely used by anybody who needs to develop something with requirements such as those I have mentioned. Layers of abstraction need to be built on top of something, and that something needs to work efficiently and quickly.