[NTLUG:Discuss] Evil GCC-2.96

[Steve Baker]

cbbrowne at ntlug.org wrote:

> It does not surprise me that you'd not find programs that wouldn't
> compile; consider that:
>   a) The _problem_ that is being griped about is object code
>      incompatibility, not that you can't compile everything from
>      scratch;

Well, not even that.  For me, it's the principle of the thing.

If the author of a program says "This version isn't ready - please
don't put it on your distribution" - then you shouldn't put it on
your distribution.

>      The last time I used "ldd" to check /usr/bin for G++ library
>      dependancies, about all I found was GROFF and Hylafax.  For all
>      the trumpeting of the importance of C++, the C++ programs that
>      dynamically link have been _vastly_ outnumbered by C programs for
>      a LONG time...

Let's be objective about this...

Go to Sourceforge, find the TROVE software map - search under Programming language
and you'll find that by *far* the most popular languages (by *project*) are C and C++.

3,842 projects list C++ as their programming language and 4,651 list C...pretty
close I'd say...certainly you wouldn't say C++ was _vastly_ outnumbered on that
scale.

(FYI, there are also 2,561 in JAVA, 2,030 in PERL and 1,888 in PHP.  All the rest
are down in the noise.  Thankfully, only 35 projects admit to
being in Fortran and Cobol isn't even listed as an option!)

>      To be a wag, the kernel isn't written in C++, nor is XFree86,
>      nor Emacs, nor TeX, nor Perl, nor Python, nor Apache, nor GLIBC.
>      If none of those important Linux-related programs are written in C++,
>      why would anyone consider C++ to be of any importance?  :-)

Because I write everything in C++ and I consider what I do to be important -
or else I wouldn't do it.  I have 1.2 million lines of C++ code at work and
probably a third of that written at home.  Why would I consider C++ to be
of any importance?

C++ isn't widely used for system-level libraries because it's not easy to
call C++ class objects from other programming languages.  That explains
why GLIBC, Xfree86 and Python are not in C++...they can't be.  Emacs and
TeX are both too old to have been written in C++ - ditto most of the GNU
utilities.  I can't explain the warped minds of the Perl authors - but they
wrote one disgusting programming language in terms of another slightly less
disgusting one...so who knows what *they* were thinking!  :-)

However, FLTK, FlightGear, PLIB, CrystalSpace and almost all reasonably large
games.  Just those four packages taken together total more lines of source code
than the Linux Kernel.

Still, this isn't the place for "C++ is/isn't better/more-significant than C"
arguments, I just wanted to point out that there certainly is a significant
amount of C++ in the more modern bodies of free software.

> The problem that RHAT introduced was yet another aggressive introduction
> of something not quite ready, which _worsens_ interoperability which
> was supposed to be the point to things like LSB.

Yes, exactly.

----------------------------- Steve Baker -------------------------------
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