Path: utzoo!censor!geac!torsqnt!hybrid!scifi!bywater!uunet!ithaca!garry
From: garry@ithaca.uucp (Garry Wiegand)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++
Subject: C++ considered ready to face the world?
Message-ID: <1991Jan24.085547.910@ithaca.uucp>
Date: 24 Jan 91 08:55:47 GMT
Organization: Ithaca Software
Lines: 46

I like what I've seen of C++ so far - a lot of the subtleties are
like twisty little passages all alike, but if you avoid these by
building up some strong guiding coding customs then C++ looks like
it could be a lot of fun, and sensible.

So I am getting ready to spec C++ as the language to be used for a
large (about 100K lines w/o comments) new project here. The project
must in the end be portable to essentially every workstation, most
supers, many micros, and a few mainframes. My strong preference
would be to have a C++ compiler or translator available on each and
every machine; in up to a few cases we could live with carrying over
the C output of a translator running elsewhere. 

I have been listening to the discussion about g++ and I am feeling
nervous: do people believe that C++ is mature enough now to really
face the world? Can the implementations of this language bear the
load of a real-world project? 
 
To give some specifics, I can see that there will probably be
"usable" real compilers available for PCs, Macs, and a majority of
the workstations (dec, hp, apollo, sun, sg) in time for the porting
phase of the project (9-12 months from now.) Am I right in this? 

For "all the others", I suppose I'm going to need to use C++-to-C
translators. The only translator I know about so far is AT&T's
cfront. Is it the only one? Is there any PD one that I could 
port to strange machines myself?

I do not have a copy of cfront yet; can I feed in the
characteristics of any arbitrary back-end C compiler (I'm thinking
of the basic sizeofs plus knowledge of struct packing) and have it
produce correct appropriate C code? 

Even better, can cfront produce C code that is clever enough to be
directly portable to an arbitrary machine, without further ado?

[I have reason to worry about language portability: it's only been
in the last 12 to 24 months that regular C compilers have gotten
stable enough that we don't have to jam "workarounds" into our
source all the time. When we started, in 1986, the C world was a bit
of a mess.] 

many thanks for your thoughts

Garry Wiegand    ---    Ithaca Software, Alameda, California
...!uunet!ithaca!garry, garry%ithaca.uucp@uunet.uu.net