Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems

Posted Sep 4, 2014 10:14 UTC (Thu) by jb.1234abcd (guest, #95827)
In reply to: Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems by nix
Parent article: Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems

Why do not you educate yourself a bit in facts that are available in public
domain, but obviously require some mental effort to do it ?
Otherwise you will not understand what people are talking about and react like a cat whose tail was stepped on.

Firstly, a C++ Standards Committee is a technical, but also a political body.
You should understand the origin of the term "designed by committee".

Secondly, you have to understand what C++ is, and its history.
C++ was built on C; Stroustrup originally called it "C with Classes".
What it means is that majority of C became a "subset" and a hostage of C++.
So, it is clear that C++, thru its governing body C++ Standards Committee,
suffers from a split personality disorder - letting C evolve would shake C++ boat. It would create C and C++ incompatibilities (C99 anybody ?) that are not desired. This works both ways.

Thirdly, there is an interesting inverse relationship between an expansion of semantics and syntax of C++ (C++11, soon C++14), called "featurism" by some, and a rapid decline in C++ acceptance as shown on chart I quoted. The OOP part of "a new paradigm" contributed to it as well.
According to Stroustrup, there is another language trying to emerge from C++. The question is: with or without C "subset" hostage of C++ ?

Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems

Posted Sep 4, 2014 14:29 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

OK, so it's pretty clear that you don't know anyone who attends committee meetings and thus you're calumnifying people when you have no idea who they even are. (Hint: some of them read LWN.)

Parrotting bits of D&E at me would be more impressive if there were any sign you'd understood it -- Stroustrup doesn't exactly display any signs there of wanting to cover any parts of C with dirt (other than decrying the use of the C preprocessor in C++ programs, which is pretty justified, I'd say).

btw, C *has* evolved since C++ was created: you even mention one example. Nobody much likes having the languages drift into incompatibility, but not because of some nefarious plot on the part of either committee: rather because nobody wants 'extern "C"' and link-compatibility to break.

If the C++ committee wanted to cover C with dirt, would the two committees really have spent so much time and effort making sure their newly-formalized memory models were to some degree compatible? And yes, though C11 did incorporate the model from C++11 rather than the other way round there was definitely attention paid on the part of the people defining the C++11 memory model to make sure they weren't specifying something that made no sense for C.

Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems

Posted Sep 5, 2014 14:03 UTC (Fri) by jwakely (subscriber, #60262) [Link]

Erm, C has it's own standards committee, WG14, who are not held hostage by the C++ committee and do their own thing. The fact that WG14 don't make many changes to the language nowadays is nothing to do with the C++ committee.