Re: Move GDB to C++ ?

[Vladimir Prus <vladimir@codesourcery.com>]

On Monday 14 July 2008 20:39:21 Robert Dewar wrote:
> Vladimir Prus wrote:
> 
> > I think you're falling into a trap common for planning large transitions.
> > It seems reasonable to prepare of list of points, and compare alternatives
> > on each point. However, I never saw this work, 
> 
> I have seen it work many times, and managed several transitions of
> this type ...

Probably, you've managed that in a commercial company? Because in open-source,
you rarely have a single manager who can be used to resolve issues on which 
no concensus can be reached in reasonable time. 

> > Most transitions I saw involved:
> > 1. A few folks pushing for specific solution that improves on the current
> > status quo.
> > 2. Other folks expressing opinions like "we absolutely need XXX"
> 
> Sounds like they were badly mismanaged

You are free to feel this way. But to give a concrete example, switch to SVN, for many
projects such as GCC or C++ Boost, definitely improved things and therefore were much
better thing than endlessly discussion which version control is best.

> > So, here, what are your most important concerns? Do you see those concerns can
> > be mitigated, or not?
> 
> > The problem is the book named "The C++ Programming Language" went through at 
> > least 3 revisions, presumably with extra help of professional editors. Do we want
> > to beat that? And why newcomers who already read this book should read the
> > documentation for our non-standard mechanisms.
> 
> Well I don't know the code well enough, but what exactly do you mean
> by non-standard here---not conforming to the C standard??? 

I mean a high-level design patterns and constructs that closely correspond
to existing constructs of C++, but yet implemented in a home-grown way,
and unknown to either C++ programmers or C programmers outside GDB.

> The GDB code 
> I *have* looked at all seems like fairly standard C to me!

Tom has posted a list of such things in GDB, did you look at that list?

- Volodya