On Sat, Feb 9, 2013 at 1:50 PM, Guy Harris <[email protected]> wrote: > > (Subject line changed to match what you presumably intended.)
Yes, thank you. > On Feb 9, 2013, at 6:41 AM, Evan Huus <[email protected]> wrote: >> This just occurred to me as I was reading an article on GCC (which has >> recently migrated to using a C++ compiler, despite still being mostly >> written in C). I haven't given it a great deal of thought yet, but I >> figured I'd bring it up and see what general opinion was. >> >> At a first glance, building Wireshark with C++ compilers would give us >> two major benefits: > > ... > >> - Built-in exceptions. This would be additional migration work, but it >> would permit us to drop a non-trivial amount of code that we currently >> own in order to do our own exceptions. >> >> Note that I'm not suggesting we start writing Wireshark in C++ (that's >> an entirely different debate), but that we could compile using C++ >> compilers, and then potentially sneak in a few C++ constructs where we >> used to roll our own. > > Presumably by "start writing Wireshark in C++" you mean "rearchitecting > Wireshark as a C++ program", as once you've snuck in one C++ construct you're > writing in C++. :-) Fair point. > Note that some of Wireshark, i.e. the Qt GUI part, is already written in C++, > and at least one third-party Wireshark plugin, i.e. the WSGD packet > description language plugin: > > http://wsgd.free.fr > > is written in C++. I was aware of the QT GUI, but not of the extension. As far as I'm aware, Gerald's been doing the vast majority of the QT work, so I didn't want to take that as indicative of a general interest. > See also > > http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/User+Group+rs-osug/evan-adams > > The Old Man and the C > Evan Adams > Sun Microsystems > > Abstract > > "You can't teach an old dog new tricks" goes the old proverb. This is a story > about a pack of old dogs (C programmers) and their odyssey of trying to learn > new tricks (C++ programming). > > C++ is a large, complex language which can easily be abused, but also > includes many features to help programmers more quickly write higher quality > code. The TeamWare group consciously decided which C++ features to use and, > just as importantly, which features not to use. We also incrementally adopted > those features we chose to use. This resulted in a successful C++ experience. Very interesting article - I agree with most of it. I personally have some C++ experience (though less than I do pure C), but I have no idea what kind of experience with it others have. I do think that slowly and carefully adopting certain limited features of it would make our lives easier, though honestly the primary reason I suggested it was because of how fed up I am with MSVC :) Evan ___________________________________________________________________________ Sent via: Wireshark-dev mailing list <[email protected]> Archives: http://www.wireshark.org/lists/wireshark-dev Unsubscribe: https://wireshark.org/mailman/options/wireshark-dev mailto:[email protected]?subject=unsubscribe
