Arnt Karlsen writes: > ..why _is_ FG written in C++ and not C?
I'm going to limit myself to one public posting in this thread and will send any further responses offline. I very much doubt that I would be contributing to FlightGear if it were written in C rather C++. I wrote my first large (>10K lines) C program in 1987-88, so this is not from lack of experience. I've noticed in working on large projects for customers that large applications are 2-5 times as fast to develop and debug in Java as in C++, and about 2-5 times as fast to develop and debug in C++ as in C. I'd love to do FlightGear in Java (framerate be damned), but since I get little support, I can settle for C++. You *can* write and debug a large application in C, but it's unnecessarily hard -- just look at Gnome and GTK, which end up reinventing most of C++ in non-standard syntax, to see how ugly things can get. Big programs have to be object-oriented one way or another -- either you use C++'s standard way of doing it, or you reinvent the wheel in C with some goofy macro-based stuff. Note how C-based Gnome development procedes at a snail's pace next to C++-based KDE (I use and like Gnome, but I won't code against it), and Linux kernel development isn't all that fast these days either. Finally, while there may be more C programmers than C++ programmers, the C programmers would have to be very, very good to keep FlightGear from melting down into a formless blob while the C++ programmers need only average skill. In the end, I think we end up with a bigger talent pool this way. All the best, David -- David Megginson [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
