This is the mail archive of the
gdb@sourceware.org
mailing list for the GDB project.
Re: GDB in C++
> Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2007 20:45:10 -0700
> From: Michael Eager <eager@eagercon.com>
>
> Quoting Joel Brobecker <brobecker@adacore.com>:
>
> > > I'm in favor of switching to C++. I'm not going to argue about it if
> > > others disagree, but I'll offer to do most of the work if the
> > > consensus is positive.
> >
> > I am against this change. I'm not going to argue either, because there
> > are some technical merits on both sides, and they have been discussed
> > to death.
> >
> > However, I think that requiring a C++ compiler will make it harder
> > for some users to build GDB, just because C++ compilers are not
> > always as readily available as C compilers.
>
> What currently supported hosts do not have a C++ compiler?
If you consider GCC 2.95.3 a proper C++ compiler, probably none. And
don't expect exception handling to work reliable.
> I think that this may have been a valid concern several years
> ago, but I think the lack of C++ compilers is no longer the case.
The lack of a standards compliant C++ compiler still is though. You
can probably find a subset of the language that will work on all major
C++ compilers, but how are you going to enforce people to restrict
themselves to that subset?
Then there is the problem that with C++ compilers are generally slower
and need more memory than C compilers. This is certainly true for
GCC. We can currently build GDB on OpenBSD/mac68k and OpenBSD/vax on
machines with less than 32 MB of memory.
Anyway, end of discussion as far as I'm concerned.