Re: Rewriting pkglint in a portable language

[Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg%britannica.bec.de@localhost>]

On Thu, Mar 24, 2016 at 07:26:04AM -0400, Greg Troxel wrote:
> > If someone can convince me that C++ or even C is better suited, please
> > do so. I just fear the undefined behavior too much.
> 
> I wouldn't try to convince you of that.
> 
> C++ is really not suitable for portable code, because the history of C++
> over the last 20 years is that one constantly has to worry about
> compiler version, both in terms of updating code for pickiness of
> earlier compilers, and in terms of having a new enough compiler.   I've
> recently seen code written for C++11 (needs gcc 4.8) arrive at a
> fairly old but not really ancient compiler: gcc 4.1, as netbsd-5 has,
> and things did not go well :-(

This is quite a bit FUD. Seriously, if you want to try a program for
language version X with an implement of version Y for X > Y, what do you
expect to happen? The situation is no different for Perl, Python, Java
or even C. GCC 4.1 *is* ancient. It's more than 10 years old at this
point. C++11 code requiring GCC 4.8 is not true. Depending on the
specific library feature set, you will either need at least GCC 4.7 for
the majority of interesting things or GCC 5.1.

Joerg