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Re: Move GDB to C++ ?
On Monday 14 July 2008 20:39:21 Robert Dewar wrote:
> Vladimir Prus wrote:
>
> > I think you're falling into a trap common for planning large transitions.
> > It seems reasonable to prepare of list of points, and compare alternatives
> > on each point. However, I never saw this work,
>
> I have seen it work many times, and managed several transitions of
> this type ...
Probably, you've managed that in a commercial company? Because in open-source,
you rarely have a single manager who can be used to resolve issues on which
no concensus can be reached in reasonable time.
> > Most transitions I saw involved:
> > 1. A few folks pushing for specific solution that improves on the current
> > status quo.
> > 2. Other folks expressing opinions like "we absolutely need XXX"
>
> Sounds like they were badly mismanaged
You are free to feel this way. But to give a concrete example, switch to SVN, for many
projects such as GCC or C++ Boost, definitely improved things and therefore were much
better thing than endlessly discussion which version control is best.
> > So, here, what are your most important concerns? Do you see those concerns can
> > be mitigated, or not?
>
> > The problem is the book named "The C++ Programming Language" went through at
> > least 3 revisions, presumably with extra help of professional editors. Do we want
> > to beat that? And why newcomers who already read this book should read the
> > documentation for our non-standard mechanisms.
>
> Well I don't know the code well enough, but what exactly do you mean
> by non-standard here---not conforming to the C standard???
I mean a high-level design patterns and constructs that closely correspond
to existing constructs of C++, but yet implemented in a home-grown way,
and unknown to either C++ programmers or C programmers outside GDB.
> The GDB code
> I *have* looked at all seems like fairly standard C to me!
Tom has posted a list of such things in GDB, did you look at that list?
- Volodya