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Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

My gut feeling is(was) that C++ is a first class citizen on OpenBSD. Its interesting having my beliefs challenged like this from someone so influential.

The question becomes; if its not C++, then what is the first class citizen on OpenBSD. And if it is C++ then how do we improve support? Just going to ports seems like a poor answer.

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> The question becomes; if its not C++, then what is the first class citizen on OpenBSD.

Being an UNIX derivative the answer is quite easy, C.

Sure, but is there a popular, modern C compiler out there that doesn't compile C++ as well? Clang, GCC, Intel, MSVC... all of them compile C++ as well as C. I don't think it's possible to have first-hand support for C and not C++ any more unless you ship your own compiler. It sounds like the issue here is that OpenBSD is shipping older versions of LLVM/Clang and GCC.

Actually those C compilers you mention are implemented in C++, so yeah from that point of view you are right.

I was just speaking from language point of view, without regard to specific implementations.

OpenBSD's base ships the most recent LLVM and Clang (5.01), but there's no LLDB yet and gdb is outdated (6.3, the last GPLv2 version).

He would have had a much better time using C99 than C++11, especially since he didn't want to install a newer gdb from ports.

It's possible given his technical depth he was using more obscure C++ constructs which aren't as well supported.

[1] http://madebyevan.com/obscure-cpp-features/

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