[article] Language Design Deal Breakers

[H. S. Teoh]

On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 01:18:32PM +0200, Paulo Pinto wrote:
[...]
> Did you had the pleasure to write portable C or C++ code across
> multiple operating systems and vendors in the mid 90's?
> 
> Welcome to #ifdef spaghetti code and reluctance of using certain
> features due to inconsistent support.
[...]

Ugh! Don't remind me. Right now at work I have a project that requires
reading (yes, just reading) some heavily #ifdef'd code. It's a very,
very, very painful experience.

Not to mention function pointer spaghetti. One of the symptoms of
switching from C++ back to C is that there's no polymorphic abstraction
anymore, so the only way to have a sane polymorphic system is to use
tables of function pointers everywhere. When a bug happens in some
obscure corner of the code, it's hours and hours of hair-pulling to
discover just which of 50 different function pointer initializations
were in effect when the bug happened, for each of the 50 function
pointers traversed before the buggy code. It's gotten to the point that
every other line of code is a call through a function pointer, each of
which has its own set of 50 or so different functions that it can
potentially point to. It doesn't help that many of these function
pointers are unhelpfully named. I'm quite near the point of losing my
sanity just trying to figure out the control flow of the thing!

Ah, if only this code were written in D... :-P


T

-- 
What doesn't kill me makes me stranger.