On 2007-12-28 07:33, Brian Hansen wrote: [snip]
> Is he right? Yes and no. First of all you should realise that Linus and most other other kernel hackers are biased. When it comes down to it C++ is not a better or worse language to write a system in than C, it is just a question about how you use it. But as Linus wrote, there are a number of people out there who learned to program in Java and then learned C++ and now think that they can do some low-level programming. Truth is they can not since they have learned to think about programming in a very high-level way. Someone once said something like "nothing is impossible with enough layers of indirection", but none ever claimed that many layers of indirection was efficient. If you are down in the kernel writing code that will be run while holding a lock every micro-second counts since you are stalling the progress of other threads/processes, so you want efficiency. But if you are writing a complicated GUI for an application that will run on a 3GHz machine with 2GB RAM a few layers of indirection can be very nice, and none will notice the few milliseconds you lose. It is about choosing the right tool for the job, but also about choosing how to use the tool, just because a hammer is the right tool does not mean that hammering away is the right way to do things. -- Erik WikstrC6m
