Re: Move GDB to C++ ?

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: David Carlton <david.carlton@sun.com>
> Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2008 12:56:14 -0700
> 
> Some people strongly prefer to work (on large scale projects) in C,
> and really don't want to work in C++.  Some people strongly prefer to
> work in C++, and really don't want to work in C.  (And some people
> would rather work in Java, or Ruby, or Haskell, but none of those are
> realistic options for a GDB transition, so I'm ignoring them.)

FWIW, at least for me, this is not a language choice issue, this is an
issue of making a decision whether to invest a non-trivial amount of
time and effort into refactoring.  I would say the same things I did
in this thread if someone would suggest to refactor GDB in C.

> Given that, we can talk about technical advantages or disadvantages
> until we're blue in the face, but I don't think that will get us any
> farther.  We've already seen examples of how GDB is reimplementing
> almost every C++ concept that you can think of in C; for the C++ fans,
> that's convincing evidence that GDB development would proceed more
> smoothly in C++ (those constructs could be done with less work), while
> for the C fans, that's convincing evidence that GDB development
> doesn't need C (proof by existence).
> 
> And I don't see that more examples are going to help much.  I think
> Vladimir's proposal of doing one example of a conversion in detail is
> sensible enough, but I don't think it will change anybody's feelings
> on this matter.  I bet the results will look better to people who like
> C++, and unconvincing to people who like C; indeed, Eli's already said
> as much for the latter side.

For the record, on my daytime job we develop and maintain a very large
body of extremely object-oriented C++ code.  So much for me being on
``the latter side''.