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To: Alfred Perlstein <alfred@freebsd.org>
From: "Poul-Henning Kamp" <phk@phk.freebsd.dk>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 02 Nov 2007 13:38:03 MST."
	<20071102203803.GO77844@elvis.mu.org> 
Date: Fri, 02 Nov 2007 20:52:51 +0000
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Cc: Bruce M Simpson <bms@incunabulum.net>, freebsd-arch@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: C++ in the kernel 
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In message <20071102203803.GO77844@elvis.mu.org>, Alfred Perlstein writes:

>A policy that might be interesting is to do something along
>the lines of what we do with GPL, basically, core code in the
>kernel can not be based on nor depend on it.

I don't know if this is realistically possible, without some
kind of intermediate layer to translate, for instance inline
assembly.

But apart from it being a lot of, currently, pointless work that
would really gain us anything, as long as no viable competitors to
GCC exists, I fully agree:  Either you take portability seriously
(ie: run with any compiler) or you handle portability seriously
(ie: run it through our frontend, so any compiler can cope).

But in any case, this is all very theoretical until there are
a non-comical alternative compiler for us.


-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk@FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.