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Comment by remexre | Hacker News Reader

After you knock out those and exceptions, what's left in (C++98 - C99)? Destructors and templates?

98 won't have moves, so I'd imagine you'd end up boxing most of your structures to avoid needing to copy construct then all over the place.

You still have to manually delete things but now there's extra indirection.

Templates might be nice, but having STLy containers is where the kernel would need them most, but then above boxing issues start to exist.

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OS's have limits on when you can do some stuff - for example allocating/deleting stuff in an interrupt handler (and the associated code that interacts with it) - mostly you code around this by just not doing it if you possibly can - but C++ might be doing this behind your back. And when you do need to do it you will likely use a special allocator and associated heap that knows how to interact safely with ISRs - just doing a 'new' without being able to say "where" and "how" is a problem. And then you have to be able to delete/free it the correct way too.

Essentially it means that an important chunk of the language and standard library are off limits in an important part of an OS, and lots of evil bugs are available to people new to the game who just blindly new stuff (or let the compiler do it behind their back)

Usually a lame argument, as ISO C also isn't supported at kernel level.

RAII, templates and inline instead of macros, safer enums, strong types than plain C as less implicit conversions are allowed, namespaces instead of prefix, classes as modules with proper invariants, safer strings and arrays.

Plenty of stuff.

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