On 04/20/2013 07:05 PM, Henri Verbeet wrote:
On 19 April 2013 18:01, Vadim Girlin <vadimgir...@gmail.com> wrote:
The choice of C++ (unlike in my previous branch that used C) was mostly
driven by the fact that optimization algorithms usually deal with a lot of
different complex data structures, containers, etc, and C++ allows to
isolate implementation of all such things in separate and easily replaceable
classes and concentrate on the logic, making the code more clean and
readable.
I'm sure it would be good fun to have a discussion about the relative
merits of C and C++, though I think I've seen enough actual C++ that
you're not going to convince me it's the better language.
I never wanted to convince you that C++ is better language, I just
wanted to explain why I decided to switch from C to C++ in this
particular case.
However, I
don't think that should be the main consideration. It's probably more
important to consider what current and potential new contributors
prefer, and on Linux, particularly for the more low-level stuff, I
suspect that pretty much means C.
Well, it may be considered as a low-level stuff because it's a part of
the driver. On the other hand, I'd rather think of it as a part of the
compiler, and compilers (especially optimization algorithms) don't
really look like a low-level stuff to me. Depends on the definition of
the low-level stuff though.
To name a few examples, we can look at the compilers/optimizing backends
used by mesa/gallium: GLSL compiler (written in C++). LLVM (written in
C++), backends for nvidia drivers (written in C++)...
Vadim
I haven't tried to keep it as a series of independent patches because during
the development most changes were pretty intrusive and introduced new
features, some parts were seriously reworked/rewritten more than one time,
requiring changes in other parts, especially when intermediate
representation of the code was changed. It was usually easier for me to
simply fix the new regressions in the new code than to revert any changes
and lose new features, so bisection wouldn't be very helpful anyway. That's
why I didn't even try to keep the history. Anyway most of the code in the
branch is new, so I don't think that the history of the patches that rewrite
the same code few times during a development would make it more readable
than simply reading the final code.
I think I'm just going to disagree there. (But of course that's all
just my personal opinion, which probably doesn't carry a lot of weight
at the moment.)
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