> Someone pointed out that some developers might not feel comfortable
> using C++ and the STL. Is this a current concern?
I don't have any concerns about people choosing to use C++ because they
feel comfortable in that language. However, you may have noticed that
almost no-one writes core libraries in C++... why?
Simply C++ (and especially the STL) are not yet and perhaps may never
be mature enough to define something and expect it to work on the vast
majority of systems without tinkering.
The non-standard symbol munging, bizarre interpretations of the STL,
lack of stable free compilers on Unix, and comparatively recent
standards documentation all combine to make C preferable for defining
anything you're expecting to be widely used.
I'm biased of course, having used C++ in the mid-1990s and gone back
to C. I still have my (obsolete) copy of Stroustrup's book, and I
now prefer Java for the cases where I might once have used C++. A
CDindex API in Java isn't very useful (it can't talk to CDs) so I
concluded that the appropriate language for the job was C
Since I'm not going to write the library (at least, not without a
miraculous infusion of spare time) my word holds no power. Take into
consideration that people will want to use the library from C. If you
make that difficult, then you're doing no-one any favours.
Nick.