Re: C++

Jonathan S. Shapiro wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 9:45 AM, Tom Bachmann <[email protected] 
> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
> 
>     I strongly side with bas here. Even if you hate so many things about
>     C++ (which I'm not going to argue about), the syntactic sugar for
>     non-fancy OOP (i.e. class and method structure, single inheritance)
>     is a sufficient reason to use C++ IMHO.
> 
>  
> That is certainly a credible argument for application code.
>  
> For microkernel code, I can only tell you that we downgraded from C++ 
> back to C in Coyotos, and that doing so simultaneously reduced 
> complexity and increased performance.
>  

That's interesting to hear. Any specific reasons? (When looking at the 
pistachio source every now and then, I think I can somewhat imagine why.)

> For application code, the hazard is that all implementations of 
> abstraction involve indirection, indirection is slow, and all OO 
> languages have as a primary objective the seduction of young programmers 
> into an abiding love of gratuitous abstraction. And they succeed!
>  

Oh dear, I'm busted. Guess what language I learned first *g*. (Yes, it 
is C++, and yes, I subscribe to the "abstract whenever it makes your 
code look nicer" paradigm. But I think I also know when and how to 
break, or to omit in the first place, abstractions for performance.)