To C++ or not to C++

[Seán C. Farley]

On Fri, 24 Jun 2005, Ryan Sommers wrote:

> Greetings all... I'm about to undertake a major software engineering
> project and I can't decide between C or C++ and was wondering if I
> could get some input from the community.
>
> As part of this project I'm going to need to make use of at least 2 C
> libraries (OpenSSL and ncurses) and the application must be compatible
> with the standard range of Linux/UNIX compilers and operating systems.
> All of these signs make me sway closer to just doing it in C. However,
> one strong point always seems to pull me back to C++, constructors and
> destructors.
>
> Constructors and destructors can offer so much in the way of memory
> leak avoidance. Of course, each language can leak memory like a sieve
> if used improperly. However, for statically allocated structures
> semi-automatic garbage collection can be a nice cushion.
>
> Anyway, without getting into too much detail. Anyone had to make this
> choice on a project? What were your thoughts in retrospect? What would
> you have done different, what would stay the same...
>
> PS For this project things like polymorphisms and inheritance really
> aren't needed.

If you would like to use C but want some sort of memory handling, I can
recommend using the Apache Portable Runtime (APR) in
/usr/ports/devel/apr which uses memory pools.  Although I have not used
it before, there is also the Boehm Garbage Collector found in
/usr/ports/devel/boehm-gc.

Seán
-- 
sean-freebsd at farley.org