
Linus Torvald's rant against C++ - nreece
http://lwn.net/Articles/249460/
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bayareaguy
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".

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delackner
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.

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

~~~
Ezra
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...](http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-
control.git/57643)

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.

~~~
allenbrunson
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.

