Re: [gtkmm] Probably a stupid Gtk+ question

[Gerald Henriksen <ghenriks rogers com>]

On Fri, 09 Jan 2004 06:50:30 -0500, you wrote:

>If Gtk+ is built on an object model, why did those folks go to such
>(rumored to be) herculean lengths to build one in C, instead of just
>using C++?  I can think perhaps language bindings had something to do,

Gtk+ is quite old and C++ compiler support back then was a nightmare
as each compiler vendor implemented different parts of the standard at
any given time.  Thus any cross-platform code in C++ quickly either
became a mess of compiler specific code or you had to code to a very
poor lowest common denominator version of C++.  C++ compilers also had
a reputation for producing bloated, slow code compared to C.

It is only recently that all the major compilers have finally come
close to fully implementing the C++ standard, and the peformance
issues have disappeared.

The other major reason is that many open source programmers first pick
up C and never move beyond it.  It is typically much easier to pick up
procedural programming, and easier to site down and start coding
without doing any planning.