On 05/31/2010 04:36 PM, Thomas Neumann wrote:
Well anyone can think anything, but this view is way out of the
mainstream. I do not know of a single large real project using a
large complex language that does not have coding standards that
limit the use of the language.
I know this, but I do not understand this. I have worked in reasonably large
commercial projects. Admittedly only one had had more than a hundred active
developers (which in fact was the one with the most loose coding standards).
But as far as I have seen it coding standards are either in the spirit of
what I had proposed (emphasizing code quality over language features) or are
an over-detailed mess that is a pain in practice and gives no reasonable
justification for the imposed limitations. I would like to prevent the later
for GCC.
But this is getting off-topic, GCC will probably limit itself to "C with
classes" anyway. Which in my opinion is a shame, but such is life.
Maybe I am reading too much into what Mark has been
saying but from a practical view, nothing is going to happen
quickly. Maybe the question shouldn't be phrased in terms
that make it sound like a C++ feature will never be used but
in terms of which have the clearest near-term impact. So
this is defining the first set of C++ features to use.
We should not open the floodgate to every C++
feature without due consideration. Focus on features that
are easy to take advantage of in the code now and have
high payback on maintainability and readability.
This gives us an orderly transition and a chance for those
GCC developers who are not expert C++ programmers to
learn on the job.
I think that "C with classes" with single inheritance
and using the standard library where appropriate are
the logical first step. That's enough surgery and
the payback is high. It also forces the examination
of public interfaces, bootstrap compiler issues, etc.
Another thing that has bothered me is the fear of
getting slower. If using C++ makes GCC slower, then
GCC C++ needs to get faster. This is eating our own
dog food. :)
Thomas
--joel sherrill
