How I stopped worrying and switched to C++ for my Bob Scheme VM

http://eli.thegreenplace.net/2011/11/30/how-i-stopped-worrying-and-switched-to-c-for-my-bob-scheme-vm/

by wglb • 15 years ago

79 18 15 years ago

eli.thegreenplace.net

jdpage• 15 years ago

For one of my current projects, I found myself in a similar position. I actually ended up picking Go instead of C++, since it's a language I've been wanting to learn for a while, and the feature set intrigues me. I have yet to see how this decision pans out though.

eliben2• 15 years ago

Well, I already had the VM implemented in Python, so I really wanted to do that in C or C++. Go was not an option because (1) one of the goals was to understand how other VMs are implemented, and most VMs today are C/C++, and (2) I wanted a language without garbage collection (which Go has, AFAIK)

lucian1900• 15 years ago

Perhaps Vala would also be a viable language for this sort of thing.

I've been pondering writing a GC in Vala to learn more about them, and see how suitable Vala is to low-level work.

marshray3• 15 years ago

Nice to read an article about someone successfully using C++ in an ordinary way, even with a little OO to it. We know it happens all the time given the volume of C++ in development.

But so many articles are like "C++ isn't OO", "C++ has awful syntax", "C/C++ is insecure", "ZOMG templates", etc.

barrkel• 15 years ago

The problem with C++ isn't that it has any one of these problems; the problem is that different people have different opinions on what the problems are.

malkia2• 15 years ago

I'm currenty on a project, where C++ is used as "C", and I'm quite fine with this. In couple of the thread loops, there is setjmp handler waiting for longjmp... It's also waiting for the unaware new programmer on the team to use RAII, and not suspect it's failing. (We use longjmp/setjmp not only for error situations, but to handle other exceptional situations and recover from them). One of the platform we are targeting simply does not support C++ exceptions.

marshray3• 15 years ago

I don't mind that kind of a problem.

Any language that lacks a diversity of opinions about its strengths and weaknesses doesn't sound very interesting to me. I suspect it lacks expressive power.

I once started a job which involved a little bit of Perl. The other Perl programmers on the team were a little freaked out by my unfamiliar Perl syntax. I didn't tell them that everything they objected to was from the O'Reilly book "Perl Best Practices". :-)

wglb• 15 years ago

And, for teams that use C++, there are different subsets of what they choose to apply.

fredsanford• 15 years ago

Bob language and VM already exists... :)

http://drdobbs.com/open-source/184409401

viandante• 15 years ago

Is your code posted somewhere?

Marwy• 15 years ago

http://code.google.com/p/bobscheme/source/browse/#hg%2Fbarev...

eliben2• 15 years ago

The 3rd and 4th words in the linked post point to Bob's Google Code page (http://code.google.com/p/bobscheme/) where its code is stored.

The code is wholly in the public domain, by the way - http://code.google.com/p/bobscheme/source/browse/COPYING

How I stopped worrying and switched to C++ for my Bob Scheme VM

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