Re: Abysmal state of GTK build

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>
> Cc: ofv@wanadoo.es, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Mon, 22 Aug 2022 23:44:24 -0400
> 
>   > What's wrong with C++ in GUI code?
> 
> Requiring a C++ compiler to build Emacs is a big practical
> disadvantage.  Including C++ code in Emacs will be an obstacle for
> people such as me to debug or write code.  That is independent of what
> jobs the C++ code is used to do.

I think you have in mind use of all the advanced features of C++,
which makes debugging harder.  But that is not the intent, and is not
really needed for this purpose.

> Using it in code that runs on the GNU system would make the problem
> much more serious.  No, no, no!

Like I said, we already have that in two flagship projects: GCC and
GDB.  And they actually do use almost the full spectrum of C++
features, all over the place.

By contrast, if we ever go this way (and due to the license issue it
doesn't currently look like we will), the C++ code will be limited to
the back-end parts of the display code, basically the
equivalents/siblings of xterm.c and xfns.c.  That is an entirely
different scale.