On 10/12/23 11:35, Gavin Smith wrote:
Calling [using Perl] a "mistake" is a very strong statement! Why do you say that? Surely texi2any 7.0.3 (2023) is more functional than makeinfo 4.13 (2008) was.
That is not a meaningful comparison. The question is: If we had re-written makeinfo/texi2any using C++ rather than Perl there is all reason to believe it would have been similarly functional at this point. The most obvious reason Perl was the wrong choice was performance: As you recently mentioned some people are still using the old pre-Perl tools for that reason. And this is after years of tuning the Perl code. Another problem with Perl is that was a relatively obscure language, in that not many people had much experience writing big complicated programs using Perl. And that has gotten worse in the intervening years. A related issue is tooling: There is a lot of available and up-to-date tooling for C++, including gdb.
I'm not much of a fan of C++ tbh.
I have a lot of C++ experience, and I am a big fan. For almost any program where C might be a reasonable choice, C++ is likely to be a better choice. C++ is admittedly a big complicated language - but if you focus on C and add classes, methods, and inheritance it's not very complicated and it's already a big win over C. Memmory management (RAII) is also easier and less error-prone: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/cpp/object-lifetime-and-resource-management-modern-cpp?view=msvc-170 It is much easier to make a large C++ program well-structured and maintainable: Classes help immeasurably, as do namespaces. -- --Per Bothner p...@bothner.com http://per.bothner.com/
