> But IMHO not sufficient for a switch. The GCC C++ proponents should do > more on a branch to convince. Yes, the syntactic suger for vec.h isn't > very nice, but the actual implementation is very clever and heavily tuned > for GCC's needs; if we convert to C++ just because of vec.[ch], we open > ourselves to what is being discussed in this thread, people who would like > to turn GCC codebase into yet another LLVM, which not everybody finds > actually very readable and maintainable code, would start doing so.
Maybe, but if we don't convert vec.[ch], there is no point in using C++ at all. We could put in place a strict containment policy: no one is allowed to write non-C code for modules that haven't been explicitly approved. Conversions on a module level are done on a branch and merged into mainline as a whole. And state prominently that there is no long term goal towards a complete rewrite of the compiler in full-blown C++, so that people don't waste time making big plans for such a rewrite. -- Eric Botcazou