I'll quote the relevant part here, since that's a long email: A word of warning: Linus has very strong feelings about all the things that are wrong with C

I'll quote the relevant part here, since that's a long email: A word of warning: Linus has very strong feelings about all the things that are wrong with C++ and at times has been known to be less diplomatic than me when explaining his point of view... :-) But he made a clear statement that he is interested in seeing this port happening, as long as most of the program logic that is not UI code stays in (quote) "sane C files". So please keep that in mind as we drive this further. If you read emails around that point of time, GTK+ development had really gone off the rails in everyone's viewpoint, and was frustrating Linus and everyone else.