linux内核 c++开发,为什么Linux内核不使用C++开发

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. What's important about object-oriented programming is the techniques, not the languages used.(面向对象编程的要点是使用面向对象技术(编程思想)，而不是使用的语言)

Should the kernel be rewritten in C++? This is likely to be a very bad idea. It would require a very large amount of work to rewrite the kernel (it's a large piece of code). There is no point in just compiling the kernel with g++ and writing the odd function in C++, this would just result in a confusing mix of C and C++ code. Either the kernel is left in C, or it's all moved to C++.

To justify the enormous effort in rewriting the kernel in C++, significant gains would need to be demonstrated. The onus is clearly on whoever wants to push the rewrite to C++ to show such gains.

Is it a good idea to write a new driver in C++? The short answer is no, because there isn't any support for C++ drivers in the kernel.

Why not add a C++ interface layer to the kernel to support C++ drivers? The short answer is why bother, since there aren't any C++ drivers for Linux. However, if you are bold enough to consider writing a driver in C++ and a support layer, be aware that this is unlikely to be well received in the community. Most of the kernel developers are unconvinced of the merits of C++ in general, and consider C++ to generate bloated code. Also, it would result in a confusing mix of C and C++ code in the kernel. Any C++ code in the kernel would be a second-class citizen, as it would be ignored by most kernel developers when changes to internal interfaces are made. A C++ support layer would be frequently be broken by such changes (as whoever is making the changes would probably not bother fixing the C++ code to match), and thus would require a strong commitment from someone to regularly maintain it.

Can we make the kernel headers C++-friendly? This is the first step required for supporting C++ drivers, and on the face seems quite reasonable (it is not a C++ support layer). This has the problem that C++ reserves keywords which are valid variable or field names in C (such as private and new). Thus, C++ is not 100% backwards compatible with C. In effect, the C++ standards bodies would be dictating what variable names we're allowed to have. From past behaviour, the C++ standards people have not shown a commitment to 100% backwards compatibility. The fear is that C++ will continue to expand its claim on the namespace. This would generate an ongoing maintenance burden on the kernel developers.

Note that someone once submitted a patch which performed this "cleaning up". It was ~250 kB in size, and was quite invasive. The patch did not generate much enthusiasm.

Apparently, someone has had the temerity to label the above paragraph as "a bit fuddy". So Erik Mouw did a short back-of-the-envelope calculation to show that searching the kernel sources for possible C++ keywords is a nightmare. Here is his calculation and comments (dates April, 2002):                                                                        % find /usr/src/linux-2.4.19-pre3-rmap12h -name "*.[chS]" |/ xargs cat | wc -l 4078662                                               So there's over 4 million lines of kernel source. Let's assume 10% is comments, so there's about 3.6 million lines left. Each of those lines has to be checked for C++ keywords. Assume that you can do about 5 seconds per line (very optimistic), work 24 hours per day, and 7 days a week:

5 s        1 hour        1 day      1 week

3600000 lines *--------- * --------- * ----------- * ---------- = 29.8 weeks

line       3600 s     24 hours   7 days

Sounds like a nightmare to me.You can automate large parts of this, but you'll need to write a *very* intelligent search-and-replace tool for that. Better use that time in a more efficient way by learning C. Note that this is the time required to do a proper manual audit of the code. You could cheat and forgo the auditing process, and instead just compile with C++ and fix all compiler errors, figuring that the compiler can do most of the work. This would still be a major effort, and has the problem that there may be uses of some C++ keywords which don't generate a compiler error, but do generate unintended code. In other words, introduced bugs. That is not a risk the kernel development community is prepared to take.