Hi. I haven't really tried much of C++ to be honest, but its sheer size and complexity means we should best avoid it, IMO. It can be confusing enough trying to understand some parts of the Zend engine without having to deal with operator overloading, templates and so-on. C is small enough that, aside from some of the complex undefined behaviour involving integer overflow and such, I can remember most of the language itself, making development much easier. And sticking with C89 means there's also great compiler support - C99 still isn't fully supported in GCC, 13 years after standardisation! C++ has better support, of course, but C++'s magic and abstractions don't seem appropriate.
-- Sent from Samsung Mobile Andrew Faulds http://ajf.me/ Stas Malyshev <smalys...@sugarcrm.com> wrote: Hi! > That's where it gets ugly, in my experience; there are lots of > mediocre C++ developers (and legions of even expert > PHP/JavaScript/Python/Ruby/etc. devs) who couldn't so much as use a > pointer without <insert favorite C++ pointer wrapper here> around to > check their NULLs and do their deletes for them. As a person who used both C and C++ and had to figure out others' code written in C and C++, my experience is that C code is usually easier to figure out (unless it's written in some heavily macro-ed style - remember that C preprocessor is a separate functional language and if you mix the two you can make some fine mess there) because C++ has tons of magic you have always to keep in mind. Operator is never just an operator, assignment is never just an assignment, pointer dereference is never just a pointer dereference. There's magic in all of that. And don't get me started on multilevel templates and trying to figure that out. Of course, C++ gives you a nice means of hiding complexity. But if you're not careful, you'd hide it in a way that it's still there, but you are no longer able to figure out where it is. So if somebody thinks C++ is a panacea here - probably not. Some pieces of Zend Engine are genuinely complex because they do complex things. I don't think hiding it behind C++ would help us much. Yes, we'd earn some with making zval an object, but probably not as much as one would think. -- Stanislav Malyshev, Software Architect SugarCRM: http://www.sugarcrm.com/ (408)454-6900 ext. 227 -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
