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List:       mozilla-general
Subject:    Re: To give you an idea of QtScape code...
From:       Arnt Gulbrandsen <agulbra () troll ! no>
Date:       1998-04-12 14:51:22
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Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>
> You're assuming that C++ is in any way portable or suitable for writing a
> true cross-platform application.  All of the horror stories that I've
> heard on that subject indicate otherwise.

I've heard horror stories too.  But my personal experience porting Qt
to a new compiler typically requires changes to <10 lines of code now.
Porting to Comeau C++ required that three callback functions be
declared as extern "C", porting to USL C++ required that two two-line
functions be rewritten as three-liners.  The old HP-UX CC (not aCC)
was harder.  That took most of a day.  Porting to SGI Delta/C++ took
time too, mostly because the compiler found tens of bugs.  Code that
wasn't C++ but happened to be accepted by MSVC++ and gcc (the
compilers we used for regular development back then).

Frankly, I expect porting a large body of code to a new platform to
take a day, no matter what language it's written in.

C++ sucks, but its portability doesn't suck worse than the other
languages I've used, and I suspect that a lot of the second-hand
horror stories I've heard are told because of C++' suckiness in other
respects.

(I won't be continuing this thread on the list.  Too far off topic.)

--Arnt

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