CppCon 2019

“If you’re arguing, you’re losing”, or so said Dan Saks when discussing migrating legacy C codebases to C++. Many of the arguments that you hear against using C++ deal with the level of abstraction provided by objects and the STL (or templates, in general). However, there are many standard practices in C codebases that can benefit from some C++ tactics without having to introduce any of those features of the language. In this talk, we will look at some history of C to understand the viewpoint of C programmers. Then we will see methods to both improve both the reliability and maintainability of the codebase, while not alienating the existing developers. Along with these techniques, we will use compiler output that can be used to prove that we aren’t introducing any new overhead. Armed with these tools, we can move this legacy code and your team forward in preparation for the day where the file is renamed from C to CPP.