[FFmpeg-devel] Re: [RFC] C++

["Rémi Denis-Courmont via ffmpeg-devel" <ffmpeg-devel@ffmpeg.org>]

Le keskiviikkona 22. lokakuuta 2025, 16.07.36 Itä-Euroopan kesäaika Timo 
Rothenpieler via ffmpeg-devel a écrit :
> C++ can be used as-is, since it can read all our headers just fine.

FFmpeg public headers are C++-compatible and, frankly as a C developer, I find 
that annoying. Not sure about Zig, but Rust does not care about your C headers 
and won't require C programmers to muck with their header files to appease 
rustc.

Or more accurately, it gives you the choice to use or not to use bindgen to 
parse the C headers. And frankly, you are more often than not better off not 
using it.

> Using anything else needs extensive and constant porting work, that then 
> will also make future iterations of internal APIs much harder if not 
> impossible, forcing people who have zero experience with the other 
> language to learn it, just to enhance the C side of things.

> Plus, most of these fancy modern languages are not just a programming 
> language, but they also want to play package-manager, which then forces 
> all of its downstream users to babysit a ton of package version, which 
> largely don't give a damn about stable APIs.

C++ sucks just as badly as Rust to make stable APIs/ABIs. In the end, you end 
up having to expose a C interface, whether you're using C, C++, Zig, Rust or 
anything else. And you'll have to do that forever, since C is the lingua 
franca of system-level programming interfaces.

> So we then need to constantly monitor all those dependencies for bugs 
> and issues, and potentially a fix for one pulls in breaking API changes, 
> which then need to be addressed and backported.

FUD much? How exactly do any other language relieve you from the problem of 
tracking bugs in dependencies?

Cargo gives you the *choice* of pinning or not pinning the versions through 
the lock. FFmpeg should *probably* not pin anything and just specify minimum 
version requirements. And it'll be the exact same dependency hell that we 
already have (or don't have - that's subjective) with C. Nothing to see here.

-- 
ヅニ-クーモン・レミ
Villeneuve de Tapiola, ex-République finlandaise d´Uusimaa



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