Re: C++ thoughts for Berlin

On Wed, May 29, 2013 at 12:05 PM, Blair Zajac <blair_at_orcaware.com> wrote:

> I'm generally in favor of a move to C++, it would be nice to get features
> that we work around now in C.
>

Rewriting even some of our core libraries to use C++ (even if it we kept
the existing C API) just doesn't seem to address any real problems that we
have. We'd likely be having to write off support for a lot of platforms
due to the inconsistent nature of many C++ compilers on platforms we have
supported since 1.0. I do not think this is a good thing.

With regards to libraries, I have had nothing but horrible developer
experiences with Boost - it's pretty counter-intuitive in a lot of places;
and C++11 isn't anywhere near widely supported to be considered if we want
to keep broad platform support.

As trying to use APR in a C++-based memory management model is fraught with
paradigm conflicts, we'd quite likely need to write a new portability layer
and new HTTP networking layer. Fun! (Not.)

BTW, I believe that GCC is special - due to its bootstrapping
methodologies, it's only really meant to be compiled by itself - this
doesn't apply to Subversion, so I think that analogy is a bit of red
herring.

If we really switched to having core libraries written in C++, I would
forcefully argue that it has to be SVN 2 (regardless if we kept the C API
identical)...and I'd probably say we should just rename the project to
something else - it's not Subversion at that point, but something else. --
justin
Received on 2013-05-30 02:48:59 CEST