Re: Switching to C++ by default in 4.8

[Gabriel Dos Reis <gdr@integrable-solutions.net>]

On Wed, Apr 11, 2012 at 7:34 AM, Bernd Schmidt <bernds@codesourcery.com> wrote:
> On 04/11/2012 09:45 AM, Gabriel Dos Reis wrote:
>> I have been having difficulty following the twists and the turns and
>> the goal post moving.
>> Are you essentially requiring to see GCC rewritten in C++ before we
>> switch to C++?
>
> Frankly, despite all this discussion, we still don't really know what
> the people who insist on a C++ conversion actually want to do. We've
> seen trivial suggestions like rewriting vec.[ch], which isn't really
> going to make a big difference in the grand scheme of things, but
> everything else has remained vague. At the GCC gathering last year we
> saw a presentation which made me feel like language features had just
> gone in search of possible applications, which doesn't fill me with a
> lot of confidence either.
>
> So yes, I would like some significant part rewritten in the way the C++
> folks would like to see it, so we can actually judge what we will get.
> And that's moving my personal goal post from "hell no" somewhere closer
> to what the C++ proponents would like.
>
> The incremental approach (tearing down the barrier of stage1 being
> compiled in C first and then getting things in piecewise) may seem like
> a path of less resistance, but we can't afford to have a thread like
> this for every change, and I wouldn't like to see us decide after 100
> patches that the end result sucks and we have to either live with it or
> revert the lot.
>
> IMO, gimple might be worth trying to convert, since it's the newest code
> in gcc and presumably already half-way to what people consider a
> "modern" style (lots of annoying little functions that get in the way
> while debugging).
>
> But I suspect that when such a branch has been done, it will still come
> down to personal preference as to which variant is best. This is why I
> still think the whole thing is deeply misguided, as it's not about
> objective technical issues, but merely about language preferences, and
> everyone has a different one. You can't match everyone's taste in a big
> project, and thus real developers have to adapt to a project, not the
> other way round. Discussions like this are a toxic distraction from real
> work.
>
> IMO it would be best if we could find a majority of global reviewers to
> speak out and say once and for all "no, this just isn't happening", so
> we can drop all this nonsense and get back to improving the compiler for
> users. The second best thing would be to have a branch with actual work
> done for us to consider.

The reason why I am mystified is that the people who seem to argue
that it would be pointless to convert the existing codebase to C++ seem
to be the same people who insist on seeing significant part of GCC
converted to C++ before we switch to *building* stage1 with a C++ compiler.

-- Gaby