原文链接:http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/lkml/
- (ADB) Again, this has to do with practical and theoretical reasons. On the practical side, when Linux got started gcc didn't have an efficient C++ implementation, and some people would argue that even today it doesn't. Also there are many more C programmers than C++ programmers around. On theoretical grounds, examples of OS's implemented in Object Oriented languages are rare (Java-OS and Oberon System 3 come to mind), and the advantages of this approach are not quite clear cut (for OS design, that is; for GUI implementation KDE is a good example that C++ beats plain C any day).
- (REW) In the dark old days, in the time that most of you hadn't even heard of the word "Linux", the kernel was once modified to be compiled under g++. That lasted for a few revisions. People complained about the performance drop. It turned out that compiling a piece of C code with g++ would give you worse code. It shouldn't have made a difference, but it did. Been there, done that.
- (REG) Today (Nov-2000), people claim that compiler technology has improved so that g++ is not longer a worse compiler than gcc, and so feel this issue should be revisited. In fact, there are five issues. These are:
- Should the kernel use object-oriented programming techniques? Actually, it already does. The VFS (Virtual Filesystem Switch) is a prime example of object-oriented programming techniques. There are objects with public and private data, methods and inheritance. This just happens to be written in C. Another example of object-oriented programming is Xt (the X Intrinsics Toolkit), also written in C.