On 07/12/14 15:27, Alexey Dokuchaev wrote: > On Sat, Jul 12, 2014 at 01:37:49PM +0100, Bruce Simpson wrote: >> On 12/07/2014 12:34, Bruce Evans wrote: >>> This joke is bad. The C++ version is worse in every way. >> >> I concur with everything you have said in your message. Moral of story: it >> is very, very easy to introduce bloat using C++, and using a higher level >> language does not automatically lead to better code quality. > > +1. Now the question is, how do we come out of this mess? Shall we redo > it in C again? Polish C++ version? Merge it with w(1) as suggested? >
Concerning the commit itself, I don't have much to add to the comments by Bruce Evans. More in general, in my experience C++ is not that suitable as a language for this kind of small utilities, where you do not need its abstraction facilities. This could be the reason why the original C version was as good as and (if polished a bit) even better (clearer) than the C++ version. Additionally, one of the properties of a code tree that influences quality is uniformity. Rewriting random small C utilities that work perfectly well in C++ breaks uniformity. Before being accused of hating C++, I like to mention that I have been involved for quite a few years in several HPC projects that use C++, but there you actually need the abstraction facilities. I can imagine that some selected utilities (or groups of utilities that share abstractions) that are difficult to maintain when written in C are rewritten in C++, but some discussion in current@ or hackers@ beforehand might be in order. Regards, Hans _______________________________________________ svn-src-all@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/svn-src-all To unsubscribe, send any mail to "svn-src-all-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"