[Info-vax] Clang

[John Dallman]

In article <jtk9utFfrffU2 at mid.individual.net>, bill.gunshannon at gmail.com
(Bill Gunshannon) wrote:

> On 11/16/22 03:14, Jan-Erik Söderholm wrote:
> > Why does C++ (or C) need to "stay competitive"?
> > If there are better tools to do the same job, why not use them 
> > instead? Is this some kind of competition between languages?
> Or egos?

I've had to manage this at my employer. It went like this: 

The company has a lot of large products, written in C/C++. These are
continuously upgraded, but there's no appetite for complete re-writes in
a different language. The size of the codebases would make this very
expensive: the one I personally work on has about a thousand man-years
work in it, and it is one of the smaller ones. 

Many of these codebases are not stand-alone programs, but libraries, or
suites of libraries, that are used by stand-alone programs. The compiler
options for several different codebases thus need to be compatible. 

The developers of the different codebases vary wildly in their keenness
to adopt new standards of C++. One library's team sees all new C++
standards as vitally important improvements, as a matter of ego, while
other products take that attitude occasionally because of something
specific in a new standard, and some aren't bothered at all. 

Complicated, isn't it? 

The way to manage this was to pick a time when the stand-alone programs
will release close together, find the latest C++ standard that would be
adequately supported at that point, and plan backwards from there.

John