Hi! > That's where it gets ugly, in my experience; there are lots of > mediocre C++ developers (and legions of even expert > PHP/JavaScript/Python/Ruby/etc. devs) who couldn't so much as use a > pointer without <insert favorite C++ pointer wrapper here> around to > check their NULLs and do their deletes for them.
As a person who used both C and C++ and had to figure out others' code written in C and C++, my experience is that C code is usually easier to figure out (unless it's written in some heavily macro-ed style - remember that C preprocessor is a separate functional language and if you mix the two you can make some fine mess there) because C++ has tons of magic you have always to keep in mind. Operator is never just an operator, assignment is never just an assignment, pointer dereference is never just a pointer dereference. There's magic in all of that. And don't get me started on multilevel templates and trying to figure that out. Of course, C++ gives you a nice means of hiding complexity. But if you're not careful, you'd hide it in a way that it's still there, but you are no longer able to figure out where it is. So if somebody thinks C++ is a panacea here - probably not. Some pieces of Zend Engine are genuinely complex because they do complex things. I don't think hiding it behind C++ would help us much. Yes, we'd earn some with making zval an object, but probably not as much as one would think. -- Stanislav Malyshev, Software Architect SugarCRM: http://www.sugarcrm.com/ (408)454-6900 ext. 227 -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
