On Aug 11, 2014, at 4:52 PM, Christian Stimming <[email protected]> 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
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