Fredrik Lundh wrote: > should we perhaps switch to (careful use of) C++ in 3.0 ?
I worry that if the Python core becomes dependent on C++, it will force all extensions to be written in C++, too. Not only is this inconvenient for people who don't know C++ or prefer not to use it, but I suspect this would lead to some severe interoperability problems. On most platforms, C code will happily link to just about anything else, but in my experience, C++ code will only interoperate with other C++ code when it's compiled by exactly the same compiler and uses the same runtime system. For another thing, I'm not sure that C++ polymorphism is flexible enough to implement Python's style of polymorphism. Think of all the tricks we play with type objects -- allocating them on the heap, extending them dynamically at runtime, etc. In C++, classes aren't even available as program-accessible entities. So we'd end up implementing our own form of dynamic dispatch anyway, and it would probably look a lot like the current C-based type objects. I don't see that C++ would help much. -- Greg _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
