Re: The Case for Rust (in any system)

Kyle Evans writes:

> We've been able to use C++ in base in a safer fashion for years and that 
> simply has not happened, so one has to question the interest in alternatives.

Have you already forgotten groff ?

We used to have groff in src for the man-pages.

Groff was written in C++ and since it was a "bootstraptool",
any breakage was high visibility.

If you look over the commitlogs, you find lots commits like:

	commit 504de8da7e199124a8c798b87d22e86bd57adaea
	Author: Marcel Moolenaar <marcel@FreeBSD.org>
	Date:   Wed May 22 01:04:42 2002 +0000
	
	    Don't build doc on ia64. No groff in sight.

and 

	commit 2d15e757812c1653497b1079e95ef260dc3db1d6
	Author: David E. O'Brien <obrien@FreeBSD.org>
	Date:   Mon Nov 8 19:00:22 2010 +0000
	
	    Back out r214961 for skeleton.c -- it broke the groff build.

and many more, until we finally had enough:

	commit 738919c0391b99947b758d85f6a8636be1886fbb
	Author: Baptiste Daroussin <bapt@FreeBSD.org>
	Date:   Wed Jun 7 23:00:34 2017 +0000
	
	    Remove groff from base
	    
	    All manpages in base are now compatible with mandoc(1), all roff documentation
	    will be relocated in the doc tree. man(1) can now use groff from the ports tree
	    if it needs.
	    
	    Also remove checknr(1) and colcrt(1) which are only useful with groff.
	    
	    Approved by:    (no objections on the mailing lists)

I dont know or think that C++ was the root cause of all this trouble,
maybe even far from, but I think we got vaccinated against C++ in
src just the same.

Poul-Henning

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk@FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.