On Tue, Jan 15, 2013 at 4:32 AM, Paul Fertser <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Mon, Jan 14, 2013 at 09:45:24PM +0100, CeDeROM wrote:
> > Well in fact after over year I got used to current C code, but the
> > problem with that is the code readability, program flow, names, etc.
> > Using C++ would give us objects and methods, that would dramatically
> > increase readability, program flow and extensibility... understanding
> > the code, clear organization and distinction of functionalities is a
> > benefit here...
>
> It seems to be little known that modern C++ is capable of producing a
> rather efficient code, often better than hand-crafted C, provided it
> is used by competent C++ developers.
And there in lies the problem. Where are the number of competent C++
developers that will work on OpenOCD? There's barely enough competent C
programmers to move the project forward very quickly. I know I'm neither,
but still, the rate of development isn't exactly fast.
> Even RTTI and exceptions are not
> an issue performance-wise because you can easily avoid using them
> specifically on the hot pathes (e.g. exceptions should be used only
> for really exceptional situations, and there a bit of performance hit
> of stack unwinding doesn't matter, and virtual functions are not
> needed that often either (though Java devs would disagree ;) )). BTW,
> GCC "switched" to C++ recently, and LLVM was using it right from the
> beginning.
>
And both have large, highly experienced developers working on them.
>
> It seems to be assumed by most people here that C++ benefits lie
> mostly in its OOP model, inheritance and such. Andrei Alexandrescu
> would disagree [0].
>
> In fact the language designers are concentrating currently on
> compile-time efficient type-safe generic programming. The template
> language evolved into a pure-functional Turing-complete compile-time
> language. One of the popular examples is the Boost::Spirit library
> which compile-time generates very efficient parsers from an "almost
> EBNF" description right from the C++ sources [1].
>
> So the main benefits of using C++11 would be: compile-time
> type-safety, efficient compile-time meta-programming. And of course,
> cleaner, safer, more maintainable code as the result. The downside
> would be that C++11 and its "advanced" template facilities are harder
> to learn and many people would like to use it like a dialect of Java
> (preferring inheritance over composition, avoiding template
> programming etc, which would indeed be highly inefficient and
> inelegant).
>
> To get a taste of modern C++ you can watch this introductory video by
> one of the core designers, Herb Sutter: (Not Your Father’s) C++ [2].
>
> One step that might bring OpenOCD closer to the modern programming
> practicies would be to make it buildable with g++ without any real
> redesign (similar to what GCC developers did with their compiler).
>
> [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_C%2B%2B_Design
> [1] http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_52_0/libs/spirit/doc/html/index.html
> [2]
> http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Lang-NEXT/Lang-NEXT-2012/-Not-Your-Father-s-C-
>
> HTH
> --
> Be free, use free (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html) software!
> mailto:[email protected]
>
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