What if was in a column?

Oh man, I loved my OG Droid.

This seems both awesome and dangerous. The two analogies that come to mind are home canning and home brewing. They’re both generally safe and easy. But every so often someone gives their family botulism.

Then Diogenes comes rolling through in an RV.

I’ve only worked on a few embedded systems where C++ was even an option, but they allowed 2, 4, 5, and 7. Though, for the most part most classes were simple interfaces to some sort of SPI/I2C/CAN/EtherCAT device, most of which were singletons.

Take a look at what even the proposer is saying wouldn’t be allowed in:

 (1) new and delete.  There's no way to pass GFP_* flags in.

 (2) Constructors and destructors.  Nests of implicit code makes the code less
     obvious, and the replacement of static initialisation with constructor
     calls would make the code size larger.

 (3) Exceptions and RTTI.  RTTI would bulk the kernel up too much and
     exception handling is limited without it, and since destructors are not
     allowed, you still have to manually clean up after an error.

 (4) Operator overloading (except in special cases).

 (5) Function overloading (except in special inline cases).

 (6) STL (though some type trait bits are needed to replace __builtins that
     don't exist in g++).

 (7) 'class', 'private', 'namespace'.

 (8) 'virtual'.  Don't want virtual base classes, though virtual function
     tables might make operations tables more efficient.

C++ without class, constructors, destructors, most overloading and the STL? Wow.

According to the github analysis, the kernel repository is:

• C 98.3%
• Assembly 0.7%
• Shell 0.4%
• Makefile 0.2%
• Python 0.2%
• Perl 0.1%
• Other 0.1%

So yeah, its basically all C, plus a tiny bit of assembly for very low level bootstrapping and some helper scripts.

There is no C++ allowed in the Linux kernel and Linus has gone on several major rants about how terrible a language it is.