Hi Aaron, thanks for investing time in Gnucash and also in its development towards more future-proof programming technologies. I was a bit puzzled about the benefit of switching the "normal compiling" from C to C++, just by itself. IMHO, there is of course an immediate benefit if the data structures move from plain C structs to C++ classes, with constructor/destructor and such. If you plan to do such a transition with any of gnucash's data structures, of course every code using those will have to be C++. However, just changing this into C++ doesn't also solve the problem here: The usage of the C structs in the code is just that: C structs, with foo_new() and foo_delete() functions and maybe even glib's reference counting. To really use C++ classes instead, every single usage of those old C idioms will have to be replaced by proper C++ constructs. IMHO, "just" switching the C compiling to C++ doesn't quite bring you much gain here. Do you think it helps you much? I have some doubts. I see some more benefit when changing individual data structures to C++, then switching the old C functions into wrappers that make the new C++ behaviour available to the C side. This means the existing C code can continue to compile in C, and the next steps would rather be to open the possibility for new C++ code such as unittests and maybe new GUI code in C++ (or python or something similar). IMHO this would be more benefitial. What do others think?
Regards, Christian Am Mittwoch, 6. August 2014, 13:26:14 schrieb Aaron Laws: > The motivation is to investigate a different strategy for migrating to C++. > I was skeptical that it would work at all, but, through argument, I > couldn't come up with any solid reasons why it couldn't work, so I decided > to give it a go. The strategy is: > Step 1) Get the project to compile as C++. Step 2) add poison to remove non > c++ idioms, etc. Step 3) Make higher level changes. > And the strategy entails that these steps are followed quite strictly. So > far, I don't consider Step 1 complete, because although the project > compiles and links, it's not shippable ... perhaps not even close :-). > Like... nothing works. _______________________________________________ gnucash-devel mailing list gnucash-devel@gnucash.org https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
