On Mon, Feb 11, 2013 at 12:18 PM, Richard Stearn <[email protected]> wrote: > A thought from the sidelines. I have contributed to Wireshark, once. > I probably will not contribute again (unless I find another protocol > itch to scratch). This is an observation from scratching that itch. > > Creating suite of dissectors from the skeletons in the development > guide was not difficult. When I did not understand how a particular > function worked it was a simple matter to find the code and read. > Often with object oriented languages it is not that simple as you > may need to follow the inheritance and the advantage of hiding the > detail rapidly unravels.
That's partly a hint that in general we need better documentation for our APIs, but it's a valid point regardless. Again, this thread was started with the thought that using a C++ compiler might be helpful - I specifically tried to avoid the discussion about re-architecting in an object-oriented style since that's obviously much more complicated and less (to me) clear-cut. > Would moving to C++ discourage or encourage potential contributors? Moving just to a C++ compiler shouldn't cause problems for anybody. While C++ isn't technically a superset of C, it is trivial for C programmers to avoid the few areas of incompatibility (as far as I know there are simply a few more reserved words like 'new' to avoid in variable names). > Can the complexity of the classes be controlled? As I've already mentioned, moving to C++ as a language and to object-oriented as a paradigm is a much bigger discussion, and there isn't a whole lot of point in even having it until we've moved to writing C on a C++ compiler. > Is time/effort available to document the class hierarchy? Documentation is needed regardless of language. You seem to be taking it as given that C++ inherently needs more documentation than C, but why that would be isn't immediately apparent to me. Either way, moving to C++ constructs was really not the original proposal. > Because I am on the sidelines here I am not (and should not be) > saying "don't", just saying please consider carefully. That's what this thread is for :) 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
