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Things like this make me wonder why anyone would want to write a huge project (like Firefox) in C/C++. I can understand wanting to re-use some legacy code, or p

Things like this make me wonder why anyone would want to write a huge project (like Firefox) in C/C++. I can understand wanting to re-use some legacy code, or perhaps the need for a few bits of optimized, low-level code where you really need the performance...but why not write the majority of the code in something like OCaml? I know there aren't as many good OCaml (for example) developers out there, but I'd bet that the end result would be just as fast (or faster) than the C/C++ version and have way fewer bugs (thanks to the strong type inference and succinctness of the code).

k33n 16y ago
If Firefox were an OCaml project, it would have likely died before hitting 1.0. Also, I've never used OCaml, so maybe I'm wrong here, but I highly doubt it's faster than C.
_delirium 16y ago
I'm not a C++ fan myself, but I think the complexity problem with Firefox is its various bits of internal infrastructure more than the language--- XUL, the rendering engine, custom string libraries, and a whole bunch of FooManagers and other custom interfaces intended to allow all the parts to be plugged together. The only thing I can think of offhand that a change of language might fix would be that a move to a garbage-collected language might allow for ripping out some of the FooManagers dedicated to allocating/tracking/freeing memory.