weeding out c++ keywords from sys/sys

[Marcel Moolenaar]

On Feb 15, 2009, at 7:33 AM, Christoph Mallon wrote:
> More robust error handling and less tedious resouce management  
> directly come to mind:
> Just look at normal C functions which allocate resources and have  
> multiple points which can fail. They are the usual mess of if()s,  
> goto error and lots of cleanup code. Further all this code looks  
> pretty much the same in several modules. In C++ you write the  
> resource handling code once (constructors/destructors) and then you  
> cannot forget to clean up, because thanks to scoping and defined  
> life ranges it happens automatically.

While on the surface this looks better, under the hood
it's just the same. Worse in most likelihood, because
with C the programmer writes the logic that is known to
be needed (assuming no bugs). With C++ it's the compiler
that generates code that handles all possible scenarios,
and goes beyond what is strictly needed -- as such the
cost tends to be higher, even when there are no errors
or exceptions.

I'm not saying this is a problem. All I'm saying is that
you move responsibility from the programmer to the compiler
and in general this comes at a (runtime_ cost. One we may
very well accept, mind you...

-- 
Marcel Moolenaar
xcllnt at mac.com