Why are most of the biggest open source projects in C? [closed]

Answer 1

C is very portable, much more than C++ was 10 years ago.

Also, C is very entrenched in the Unix tradition. Read more in 'The Art of Unix Programming', about Unix and OO in general, and about specific languages on unix (including C and C++).

Answer 2

C++ is a mess. It is overly complicated language, so complicated that only few people can say that they know all the bits. And fewer compilers which really complies to C++ standard.

So I think the reason is simplicity and portability.

If you want higher-level and object-oriented programming, then I think C++ is just competed with others like Python. (Note that I programmed in C++ few years, it's fast and has some features from higher-level languages that speeds up development, no offence.)

Answer 3

Eric Raymond's wonderful book "The Art of Unix Programming" has some reflections on this issue (the whole book is well worth reading in either the paper or free online editions, I'm just pointing to the relevant section -- Eric was involved with the coining and introduction of the term "open source", and is always well worth reading;-0).

Summarizing that section, Raymond claims that "OO languages show some tendency to suck programmers into the trap of excessive layering" and Unix programmers (and by extension open-source programmers) resist that trap of "thick glue".

Later in the book, you find some considerations specifically about C++, such as "It may be that C++'s realization of OO is particularly problem-prone". Whether you agree or not, the whole text is well worth reading (I can hardly do it justice here!-), and rich with bibliography pointing you to many other relevant studies and publications.

Answer 4

I have worked on a few C++ projects in my time, all of which have ended in tears one way or the other. At the most fundamental level, the truth is that people can't be trusted. They can't be trusted to write good code, they can't be trusted to debug it, and they certainly can't be trusted to understand it when they have to come back and modify it again weeks/months later.

C code doesn't have a lot of the weird stuff in C++ that makes it hard to debug (constructors/destructors, anything that happens with static global objects during cpp_initialize() time, etc.). That just makes it easier to deal with when developing and maintaining a big project.

Maybe I'm a luddite, but every time someone says "C++" around me I get shivers.

Answer 5

A lot of the projects started before C++ was standardized, so C was the obvious choice and a change later would be hard. C was standardized about a decade before C++, and has been more nearly portable for even longer. So, it was largely a pragmatic decision at the time, inspired in part by the Unix heritage of using C for most code.

Answer 6

First of all, some of the biggest open source projects are written in C++: Open Office, Firefox, Chrome, MySQL,...

Having said that, there are also many big projects written in C. Reasons vary: they may have been started when C++ was not standardized yet, or the authors are/were more comfortable with C, or they hoped that the easier learning curve for C would attract more contributors.