Re: Idle Thought - Compiling with C++

[Guy Harris <guy () alum mit edu>]

(Subject line changed to match what you presumably intended.)

On Feb 9, 2013, at 6:41 AM, Evan Huus <eapache () gmail com> wrote:
> This just occurred to me as I was reading an article on GCC (which has
> recently migrated to using a C++ compiler, despite still being mostly
> written in C). I haven't given it a great deal of thought yet, but I
> figured I'd bring it up and see what general opinion was.
>
> At a first glance, building Wireshark with C++ compilers would give us
> two major benefits:

        ...

> - Built-in exceptions. This would be additional migration work, but it
> would permit us to drop a non-trivial amount of code that we currently
> own in order to do our own exceptions.
>
> Note that I'm not suggesting we start writing Wireshark in C++ (that's
> an entirely different debate), but that we could compile using C++
> compilers, and then potentially sneak in a few C++ constructs where we
> used to roll our own.

Presumably by "start writing Wireshark in C++" you mean "rearchitecting Wireshark as a C++ program", as once you've 
snuck in one C++ construct you're writing in C++. :-)

Note that some of Wireshark, i.e. the Qt GUI part, is already written in C++, and at least one third-party Wireshark 
plugin, i.e. the WSGD packet description language plugin:

        http://wsgd.free.fr

is written in C++.

See also

        http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/User+Group+rs-osug/evan-adams

The Old Man and the C
Evan Adams  
Sun Microsystems

Abstract

"You can't teach an old dog new tricks" goes the old proverb. This is a story about a pack of old dogs (C programmers) 
and their odyssey of trying to learn new tricks (C++ programming).

C++ is a large, complex language which can easily be abused, but also includes many features to help programmers more 
quickly write higher quality code. The TeamWare group consciously decided which C++ features to use and, just as 
importantly, which features not to use. We also incrementally adopted those features we chose to use. This resulted in 
a successful C++ experience.
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