Hello waddlesplash!
C++ finally has modules as of C++20.
Do you think there's any chance that the Haiku source code will be organized around modules instead of header files at some point?
C++ finally has modules as of C++20.
Do you think there's any chance that the Haiku source code will be organized around modules instead of header files at some point?
I think if we had sufficient time and energy, we might have started our own programming language that takes a lot from C++ but would diverge sharply after the "C with Classes" part (we have joked about it before, at least.) For one, some of the paradigms we use a lot in Haiku might serve well as baked-in language features, or could be taken further with compiler support. Memory safety is also another big one; I know Rust is now the "C++ successor with memory safety," but at least to me I think it does not quite fit the bill; though we have an especially esoteric view of what "C++" is (notably I haven't put in the time to really learn Rust, honestly, though some of the other Haiku contributors are fans, and the Rust port to Haiku is sufficiently solid at this point)
The biggest thing I think we would ultimately change in any wildly hypothetical programming language we might come up with, though, would probably be ABI stability. C++ is just a huge pain to keep ABI-stable (C is as well, to a lesser extent), and there are all kinds of tricks that are clearly possible now in compilers, in ELF, etc. that there is clearly room for a slightly different language design coupled with a radically different language ABI to make ABI stability much less of a chore to maintain. (We are very big on dynamic linking and stable ABIs, something Rust seems to have basically given up on if it ever really tried, and the same in Go and other newer languages.)
I would imagine that modules instead of headers might come about as some kind of development along with ABI stability if nothing else.
On OSes that happen to be written in C, most devs tend to misunderstand the OS ABI for C ABI and then use both interchangeably.
A new OS update can bring changes, also on platforms whose OS isn't written in C, several C compiler can opt for different kinds of ABI thus not allowed for cross compiler linkage without extra steps.