On Aug 11, 2014, at 4:52 PM, Christian Stimming <christ...@cstimming.de> wrote:
> thanks for investing time in Gnucash and also in its development towards more > future-proof programming technologies. I was a bit puzzled about the benefit > of switching the "normal compiling" from C to C++, just by itself. IMHO, > there > is of course an immediate benefit if the data structures move from plain C > structs to C++ classes, with constructor/destructor and such. If you plan to > do such a transition with any of gnucash's data structures, of course every > code using those will have to be C++. However, just changing this into C++ > doesn't also solve the problem here: The usage of the C structs in the code > is > just that: C structs, with foo_new() and foo_delete() functions and maybe > even > glib's reference counting. To really use C++ classes instead, every single > usage of those old C idioms will have to be replaced by proper C++ > constructs. > IMHO, "just" switching the C compiling to C++ doesn't quite bring you much > gain here. Do you think it helps you much? I have some doubts. I see some > more > benefit when changing individual data structures to C++, then switching the > old C functions into wrappers that make the new C++ behaviour available to > the > C side. This means the existing C code can continue to compile in C, and the > next steps would rather be to open the possibility for new C++ code such as > unittests and maybe new GUI code in C++ (or python or something similar). > IMHO > this would be more benefitial. What do others think? What you say is correct, of course, but I don’t think it’s a complete waste of time to switch over to C++ for most compiles. It has a few advantages I can think of: 1. C++ compilers enforce more strict standards for C code and will catch problems the C compiler may not catch. 2. When some data structure is converted to a C++ class then there’s a good chance that any code that uses it will already be C++ code. 3. Header files won’t have to have as many #ifdef __cplusplus ... endif constructs. These are all pretty minor, but they are useful, I think. There are probably other advantages too. On the other hand it will be a lot of work to get everything to work in C++. I think only the easy part has been done so far. The last time I worked on something like this we did what you suggest, Christian, and it worked well. Whether it’s worth doing this is not obvious to me. Mike _______________________________________________ gnucash-devel mailing list gnucash-devel@gnucash.org https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel