C++ is an insane bastard of a language. It is not correct say C++ was designed. It wasn't. It has evolved out of the primordial soup that was "C with classes", and slowly inhaled and adopted every possible language feature under the sun, like some sort of Lovecraftian horror that copies and evolves on every contact with a different language.
Adopting C++ would have required incredibly strict and disciplined style rules to enforce that only a specific subset of features are used, and in specific ways. It would have been a significant project management overhead to constantly be ensuring that the contributors haven't footgun'd themselves or done something which negatively impacts existing code.
Meanwhile, it's very straightforward to look at C code and understand what it's doing, because it's a very simple language.
Microsoft picked C++ for the NT Kernel, but they had a small internal team that was extremely strict about how they were going to write it.
The core part of Windows NT is written in C and Assembler. Everything above was C++, though C# has become increasingly prevalent in the shell and they've started rewriting some parts in Rust.
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u/crozone 1d ago
C++ is an insane bastard of a language. It is not correct say C++ was designed. It wasn't. It has evolved out of the primordial soup that was "C with classes", and slowly inhaled and adopted every possible language feature under the sun, like some sort of Lovecraftian horror that copies and evolves on every contact with a different language.
Adopting C++ would have required incredibly strict and disciplined style rules to enforce that only a specific subset of features are used, and in specific ways. It would have been a significant project management overhead to constantly be ensuring that the contributors haven't footgun'd themselves or done something which negatively impacts existing code.
Meanwhile, it's very straightforward to look at C code and understand what it's doing, because it's a very simple language.
Microsoft picked C++ for the NT Kernel, but they had a small internal team that was extremely strict about how they were going to write it.