Anecdotal evidence only, but when I worked with C and C++ in large organisations the developers did strange things because they were more constrained by policies and working conditions.

Some employers had offline development environments, banned stack exchange, and decisions were made in closed rooms with small scrum teams operating to aggressive time frames.

It would be common to hear disputes over which compiler was better for debugging, produced more optimised code, etc. The decision would be made in the ceremony under vote if necessary.

Similar things happened in more public projects too. I remember being banned from one forum because my opening post was on translating some PHP into Perl.

I later discovered their lead engineer had left the organisation and launch a rival PHP version of an existing Perl product, the old injured organisation was tense, and I asked the wrong question at the wrong time.

So it’s quite believable that OpenGlide adopted C on g++ to pamper a momentary ego that nobody wants to talk about.

Hope that helps? 😀

OP hasn't been active since 2017 and posted this question 7 years before that. I doubt they've been waiting for someone to guess an answer.

C is valid C++ so why wouldn't you use a C++ compiler

Errius wrote on Today, 07:45:

C is valid C++ so why wouldn't you use a C++ compiler

While this is mostly true, yes most C is valid C++, but there are slight differences, for example C lets you convert void pointers to other kind of pointers without explicit conversion:

Valid C but invalid C++ code:

1char* somedata = malloc(size);

This will fail on C++ compilers because they don't convert void pointers automatically to other types, and some kind of cast needs to be used to convert the result.

Pure C code in .cpp extension is not right, and there are no reasons related to Visual Studio that push people to such confusing file naming. The Microsoft compiler can be forced to compile C and error out on C++ regardless of file extension, but IIRC it does that automatically with files of .c extension.. so just name the files properly to first let people know which language to use, and second have the toolchain do the right thing.

Now the choice of whether to allow some C++ in C is something else that is really up to the taste of the project owner. Each have their way...