The latest thing to come out of Iceland, following Björk, Múm and Sigur Rós, is a patch to allow C++ in the Linux kernel. It appears to be quite well optimised (the runtime library has been modified, bringing the cost of throwing an exception below that of calling good old printk() in the plain-C kernel). As such, it looks like it could be good for performance and stability; Darwin (the MacOS X kernel) is written in (a somewhat stripped-down) C++, and seems a lot more solid than Linux, and less likely to be destabilised by unforeseen conditions (i.e., devices/filesystems/&c. suddenly disappearing); I suspect that C++'s exception handling has something to do with this.
OSX kernel C++ lacks multiple inheritance and exceptions. Exceptions are probably a bad idea in a kernel, at least without some mechanism - a la java - to force people to acknowledge that they happen.
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Tue Nov 2 10:12:46 2004
OSX kernel C++ lacks multiple inheritance and exceptions. Exceptions are probably a bad idea in a kernel, at least without some mechanism - a la java - to force people to acknowledge that they happen.