[Info-vax] Userland programming languages on VMS.

[John Dallman]

In article <61fd3982$0$696$14726298 at news.sunsite.dk>, arne at vajhoej.dk
(Arne Vajhøj) wrote:

> Many would say C++ I guess, but I just got a gut feeling that C++
> would either be "programming in C in C++" or the developers
> would loose control of what is going on because one C++
> statement end up executing a ton of code under the hood.

Providing a C++ API to an OS kernel can be a really bad idea. It makes
ongoing binary compatibility much more difficult. 

BeOS decided to have a C++ kernel API, using GCC. Then the GCC name
mangling changed dramatically in the transition from GCC 2 to GCC 3. The
open-source Haiku OS, which is binary-compatible with BeOS, still has to
use that ancient GCC for part of the OS. 

GCC name mangling has changed (incrementally) more times since then. This
is not a problem for building an entire application that doesn't provide
an API, but it's a real pain for other cases. 

John