Wireshark · Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Idle Thought - Compiling with C++

[Ed Beroset <beroset@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Donald White wrote:
> That said, I have some experience with C to C++ transitions.  Twice in
> my career, the team I was with was given the job of maintaining legacy
> products written in C (several 100K lines of code) to maintain and
> enhance.  In both cases, our first step was to recompile with a C++
> compiler.  This was done as a quick and intense effort without
> introducing any C++ language features.  We would just get the code to
> compile, link and pass its regression tests.  Only later did we replace
> #defines with consts, macros with inline functions and such.  I judged
> these efforts as being very beneficial in improving code quality.

This is a reasonable approach for improving code quality.  In an open 
source project like Wireshark, I think the challenge would be in 
specifying which C++ features/constructs would NOT be used. Having 
extensive experience with both C++ and C, I'd say that some of the most 
useful features in C++ didn't even exist in 1991 when that "Old dogs, 
new tricks" article was written.  Specifically, I mean templates and the 
Standard Template Library (STL).  That said, however and at the risk of 
stating the obvious, code written in C++ looks a lot different than C 
written in C++.

For example, to me, the tvbuff.c and value_string.c files cry out for 
reimplementation as C++ classes, but to actually do such a 
reimplementation would very literally be a change to the core of 
Wireshark. If we were to use a C++ compiler as simply an enhanced C 
compiler, we'd have to figure out how to prevent submissions from 
including C++ constructs no "approved" by Wireshark coding guidelines.

Ed