Linus Torvald's rant against C++

by nreece • 18 years ago

7 5 18 years ago

bayareaguy• 18 years ago

As someone who prefers C over C++, I agree with some of what Linus says here but I wouldn't call things like STL and Boost "total and utter crap".

delackner• 18 years ago

Indeed, exactly what is the "C" way of elegantly introducing dynamically-sized arrays and Unicode strings? Memory management? You use external libraries of your choosing. In my mind stl::vector and stl::wstring (basic_string<wchar_t>) are perfectly good choices for that, in an otherwise completely C context. std::auto_ptr... not so much.

allenbrunson2• 18 years ago

sigh. can you imagine matz, guido, or bjarne having a rant like this? i can't.

Ezra• 18 years ago

What's your point? I don't mean to be a jerk, but ... what is your point?

The designers of the Ruby, Python, and C++ have (perhaps) more cordial online personalities than Linus ... so what?

And the whole "rant" is taken a bit out of context...

A patch was submitted, which used C++ in a C-only project, then some guy (Kakurin) comes out of nowhere and says "you should be using C++ on your project", and Linus replies with reasons that they are not going to use C++.

So it's not, "C++ is stupid;" it's closer to "no, we are not using C++ for Git" ... even if what he said was "C++ is stupid."

To get a better picture of the discussion, you should really read the preceding comments, as well as the follow-ups.

The root of the thread can be found here: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/5764...

The "hair trigger" might be explained by the fact that Linus' other project, the Linux kernel, is also C-only and I'm sure that this (re: "letz use cpp plz") has come up before. And Linus is a jerk... whatever.

Personally I think that he articulated his point reasonably well, if a little forcefully.

Besides, if C++ would really have been That Much Better™, he's welcome to use it; just not dictate language Linus uses to write his project with... which is basically what Torvalds said. I mean, it's open source, after all.

PS. The guy who made the comment appears to (despite the GMail address) have worked at Microsoft at the time, for what that's worth.

PPS. The real "sigh" is that this post is year old, out of context link bait.

allenbrunson2• 18 years ago

so, "online cordial personalities" are pretty much a prerequisite for being a good leader. and even if you want to find fault with this particular example, there are plenty more where linus acts exactly like this.

Linus Torvald's rant against C++

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