Hacker News Reader

Comment by loeg | Hacker News Reader

Fact-check:

> FreeBSD has been supporting C++ modules for a while.

No, we don't. The link provided is to a user forum where someone asks about it, and the first response is "I don't believe that this is a good idea." I don't know why the author would just make up this false statement, but IMO it really hurts their credibility.

View on HN

The first response starts "I don't believe that this is a good idea", then makes some suggestions as to how to make it work anyway. There is plenty of room, at this point in consideration, for the thread to have reached a conclusion very different than that implied by the first sentence of the first comment.

I read the whole thing. It doesn't.

Sure. I also skimmed through more of the thread than the first comment; it just made a nice sound-bite.

I happen to know TFA's sentence is bunk from first-hand experience with the FreeBSD kernel and C++ proposals, but wanted to show that even the linked forum post doesn't really support the author's claim.

But did you? My FreeBSD knowledge is quite outdated, I believe the last version I worked with is 7, but I believe at some point, it was possible to compile C++ kernel modules for FreeBSD. This time I can not find the proof, but plus to that post I also found links like

https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2009-Feb... https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2006-Jul...

The last one mentions: "There's actually a fair amount of experience with people doing C++ in FreeBSD kernels. People have been doing things with it for about 8 years now."

People have always played around with C++ kernel modules outside the project (e.g., https://github.com/adamlsd/libcpp.ko ), but that is very different from saying the project supports C++ modules.

There are no C++ kernel modules in FreeBSD itself. There is no support for C++ kernel modules in FreeBSD itself (neither build system nor source code). Developer response to C++ kernel proposals (the most recent on private internal mailing lists I cannot share) is cold.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com