Comment by pjmlp
2 days ago
Naturally GCC was originally written in C, given its age, and the original GNU coding standards document.
With time, the GCC developers acknowledged the benefits of using C++ over C, and migrated the code.
GCC requires a C++ compiler to bootstrap since around 2012, and GNU coding standards has been updated to several languages beyond C, time to go up with times.
I think the fallacy of this argument is obvious.
Not really, given that GCC no longer compiles with a pure C compiler.
Unless of course, you don't have anything to do, and feel like bootstraping GCC 16, using a compiler chain all the way back to 2012 thereabouts.
The question is whether GCC is a good example of the benefits of C++ for compilers. Considering the code looks to 95% like C code and uses data structures that we originally implemented in C, I don't see this argument.