C++

[Peter Dufault]

On Friday, Jul 18, 2003, at 22:08 US/Eastern, Matthew Dillon wrote:

    There are lots of reasons to not use C++ in the kernel, one could
    probably go on for days listing them.  I do not personally like C++
    very much, but the biggest reason not to use it is that we are 
working
    with over 300 megabytes of C code and that means we're doing it in 
C.

OK, I'll clarify.

I'm not a C++ programmer.  I even program for PIC microcontrollers 
where I can't easily use structures because the target debugger blows 
up, but the code is still C++ because I can overload the assignments on 
Unix for simulation.  So I'm not a C++ zealot.

But simple inheritance and automatic construction/destruction is a big 
win.

You could go on for days listing reasons for not using C++ in the 
kernel, but (and I'm NOT a C++ zealot and much of my final code is 
always pure C) you could go on for days as to why now-a-days you 
wouldn't start a major project in pure C.

Anyway, this heated up much faster than I'd hoped.  If you were 
assigned to develop a kernel using a selected subset of C++ that had to 
hook in with a large C code base would you have responded with that 
"the mass of the existing code base means we're doing it in C"?

This was an architectural question from a bad but better than most C++ 
programmer who is primarily a kernel and embedded system programmer who 
primarily works in pure old-fashioned C.

Peter