Messages in this thread |  | | Subject | Re: Linux kernel modules development in C++ | Date | Thu, 28 Sep 2000 16:44:55 -0400 | From | Horst von Brand <> |
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Ragnar Hojland Espinosa <ragnar@macula.net> said: > On Thu, Sep 28, 2000 at 01:45:40AM +0200, Igmar Palsenberg wrote:
[...]
> > - The're a lot more people that know C than C++
> Let's put it the other way... there aren't many people who know C++ > around. Well, there are less people who understand the kernel. Then, > maybe, to make it more accessible, we should dumb it down.
It is not necessarily a good thing that everybody and her grandmother think they can hack on Linux... exhibit A for the defense: Look at the average skill level of your run-of-the-mill $GUI_WORDPROCESSOR user: Sure, they are able to write a memo, and are "experts"; but make that a 20-page document, and then use a different printer: Awful. This is exactly what Linus meant when he said he doesn't want an in-kernel debugger: Dumb it down, and you select dumber hackers, and the result is a mess.
[...]
> Someone mentioned they preferred C because they knew exactly what the > compiler would be generating. I wonder if they got this knowledge in some > magic way, and what makes them think that they couldn't learn what C++ > compilers do (at least G++)
Right. And C++ was designed carefully along "you pay for what you use", so with careful programming it should be no worse. OTOH, in C you _see_ the costs [OK, maybe a hardened asm-fanatic will take issue with that...], in C++ you don't necessarily see what is going on. But that is part of learning C++ well, I guess.
> Of course, yes, I do agree that if the kernel is in C and putting in C++ > requires more than some little localized glue or similar, C++ shouldn't go > in.
Right.
> But I'll never understand this C++ aversion.
When Linux started, there was _no_ decent freeware C++ compiler around. g++'s C++ was a bad joke, the compiler was very unstable, and C++ (the language) changed almost weekly. Only recently (with egcs, essentially) did the C++ support in GCC become respectable, and the language stabilized. But by that time the kernel source corpus was firmly locked into (GCC's) C for better or worse. -- 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/
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