Re: Is C++ used in life-critical systems?

From:

"Balog Pal" <pasa@lib.hu>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.c++

Date:

Sat, 1 Jan 2011 11:25:31 +0100

Message-ID:

<ifmvd9$2j3h$1@news.ett.com.ua>

"Ian Collins" <ian-news@hotmail.com>

On 12/30/10 11:46 PM, James Kanze wrote:

On Dec 30, 8:55 am, Jorgen Grahn<grahn+n...@snipabacken.se> wrote:

On Tue, 2010-12-21, Balog Pal wrote:

[...]

Member functions? That is not such a big deal alone,
easily worked around with "python style".

RAII is a big deal, and function/operator overloading, and
private/public. Probably other things too.

FWIW: private/public, in connection with member functions, are,
even today, the single most important improvement in C++ over C.
The rest is just icing on the cake---pretty nice icing, in a lot
of cases, but not as important as the encapsulation.

I'd say the automatic construction and destruction that enables RAII is
the single most important improvement in C++ over C. It's one thing that
you simply can't do in C. Encapsulation is just icing on the cake!

Yeah. At the time of writing the quoted part destructors were eclipsed in my
mind for some reason.... In many earlier posts I was pointing out that I;d
use C++ over many other stuff for nothing else but having the destructor
tech, and able to RAII.

OTOH, must mention, that in my latest embedded project (that could prbably
be a good representative of a whole class), there was nothing to RAII. As
there was no heap/free store, and no exceptions. 0 dtor-eqiualent functions
in the whole system. And calling the hndful of ctor-equivalents were not a
practical problem.

While at it I better mention the other part -- i do my project with
double-compile, and in this case the other compiler (binary output unused
beyond parts in unit tests) is used in C++ mode, so all type safety benefits
are gained anyway.