GCC in C++

I’m very pleased to see that the GCC steering committee has agreed to permit GCC to be written in C++. At one time RMS, who is a member of the steering committee, had felt that C++ was never appropriate for systems programs like GCC. It’s good to see that he has apparently come around.

There has been a long effort to prepare for this, by moving GCC’s code base from C to the common subset of C and C++. While people naturally think of C++ as an extension to C, they are different languages and there is a lot of C code which is not valid C++. In the GCC code base, one of the biggest issues was that enums are more restricted by the type system in C++ than they are in C. Another was that in C++ you may not use the same name as a typedef and a struct tag, except for the special case of making the struct tag be a typedef for the struct itself.

Gabriel Dos Reis did the first substantial work on moving the GCC code base to the common subset, and many other people contributed. I think it’s fair to say that I did the lion’s share of the work, starting with my surprise presentation on the advantages of C++ at the 2008 GCC Summit. I did a lot of work to improve the -Wc++-compat warning option to warn about C code which was not in the C/C++ common subset, and I did a lot of work to make GCC code compile with that option without warnings.

C++ will not magically make the GCC code base better. However, I believe that it will give us some useful tools to incrementally improve the code base over time, making it easier to read, easier to modify, and more efficient. I say this not based on theory, but on my experiences with gold and with the gccgo frontend. I’ve already started writing some draft C++ coding conventions which I hope we can use to guide our efforts.