Re: [Simulavr-devel] SimulAVR + simulated hardware

[Bruce R'. Miller]

On Thursday 15 January 2004 08:31, E. Weddington wrote:
> In Ted's defense:

I don't believe that anyone here would dream of attacking Ted.  I see a number 
of people offering to help out.

> I don't mean this to sound bad, but as with all open source projects, it's
> "put your money where your mouth is". In other words, if you feel that
> simulavr would greatly benefit from C++ then by all means re-architecture
> it. If you can get it working better and put in features faster than Ted,
> et al. can, then I'm sure that Ted's a reasonable guy and he might very
> well change over.

I offered to do a C++ port when I first started looking at Simulavr but I 
wasn't going to do it if no one was interested.  A couple weeks later Klaus 
trumped me by actually going ahead and doing it.  Another way of going about 
this is to take the current code as is just start using a C++ compiler to 
build it.  So, the work has been done and the money is in the same place as 
the mouth.  C++ makes it much easier to architect and maintain the code.  The 
modularity causes code changes to me much more localized.  And the compiler's 
syntax checker forces the code contributor to do much of the work that would 
normally fall to the code maintainer/debugger/user (i.e. Ted).  These are all 
pro-Ted issues.

Looking back, I see a lot of instances where Ted received patches that 
conflicted with work already in progress.  This seems to be the case often 
with C since it is lacking in abstraction mechanisms.  He then has to reject 
the patch or else rely on a very small CVS window to get everything 
integrated.  C++'s modularity addresses exactly this issue resulting in more 
free time for Ted to spend with his alleged girlfriend.  :)

-b