This just occurred to me as I was reading an article on GCC (which has
recently migrated to using a C++ compiler, despite still being mostly
written in C). I haven't given it a great deal of thought yet, but I
figured I'd bring it up and see what general opinion was.
At a first glance, building Wireshark with C++ compilers would give us
two major benefits:
- Much more up-to-date Windows compiler (see the regular litany of
complaints that is being stuck on C90 due to MSVC). As far as I can
tell, Microsoft's C++ compiler is still actively developed and already
supports some parts of C++11.
- Built-in exceptions. This would be additional migration work, but it
would permit us to drop a non-trivial amount of code that we currently
own in order to do our own exceptions.
Note that I'm not suggesting we start writing Wireshark in C++ (that's
an entirely different debate), but that we could compile using C++
compilers, and then potentially sneak in a few C++ constructs where we
used to roll our own.
Again, I haven't given this a great deal of consideration, I was just
curious what others thought.
Cheers,
Evan