C++ in the kernel

[Garance A Drosehn]

At 7:46 AM +0000 10/28/07, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
>In message <20071028074310.233895B3E at mail.bitblocks.com>, Bakul Shah writes:
>
>>  It will be the proverbial camel's nose in the tent.  A subset
>>  of C++ is attractive for kernel work but it will be hard to
>>  hold the line at that.
>
>That's one of my main arguments why we should "own the language" we
>use.
>
>The other main argument is that we can then teach the language to
>do the things we need it to do.

This seems like a good idea to me, as long as the language we come
up with is just some easy-to-follow additions to the C language.  (I
believe that has always been your intention, but I just thought it
would be good to say it again).  That way we don't get caught up in
problems when, say, the ABI's for the official C++ language are
changed, and we don't want to make major ABI changes in the middle
of a STABLE branch.

It might be prudent to say we're building a new language patterned
on something *other* than C++, just to make it clear that we won't
be tied to whatever developments coem up in the world of C++.

I've been meaning to look into D, but I don't have any experience
with programming in D, so I don't know if that would work as a
basis of a kernel-programming language.  (Not that we'd use the
official D language, either.  Just that it might be a source for
ideas of whatever we want to do)

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn     =               drosehn at rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer               or   gad at FreeBSD.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute;             Troy, NY;  USA