On Wed, May 29, 2013 at 12:05 PM, Blair Zajac <bl...@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
