Marty Fouts <marty@dotcast.com> said:
> From: Horst von Brand [mailto:vonbrand@inf.utfsm.cl]
> [snip]
> > When Linux started, there was _no_ decent freeware C++
> > compiler around.
> IMO, it was worse even than that. C++ itself hadn't stablized as a language
> to the point where it would have been wise to use on a kernel at that
> time.
Exactly what I said...
> The language only really stablized in '99, I think. It's too soon to tell
> whether it would be usable for kernel development, although various projects
> that have tried to use it in an OO way have floundered for one reason or
> another.
Nope. C++ (the language) was rather stable in '96 or so, but by then it was
too late for Linux.
> BTW, C++ isn't really a pure OO language, it is a language that has
> facilities that support a wide range of programming paradigms. One of the
> things that makes it hard to use effectively is taking that into account
> when using its various facilities.
I'd suspect the projects that floundered did so because of this. C++ is a
wonderful tool, but I can't claim to know even one person that _really_
knows how to use it right. Most "OO" development is simply C + << + >> + a
few structs sold as classes (remember "FORTRAN with ';'" when Pascal came
out?), it will still take quite a while until people are confortable with
OO (even worse multiparadigm programming (MP? Nice buzzword ;-) as in C++
for that matter), and until then the language's facilities are a burden by
and large.
-- Dr. Horst H. von Brand mailto:vonbrand@inf.utfsm.cl Departamento de Informatica Fono: +56 32 654431 Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria +56 32 654239 Casilla 110-V, Valparaiso, Chile Fax: +56 32 797513 - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Sep 30 2000 - 21:00:24 EST