C++ or C (or both?)

Some of you may have made use of Dean Jones' CleanCode Email. It's a nicely done mail sender - it's not an SMTP server, it just sends mail, but lets you specify the gateway or smart host to use, which makes it wonderful for systems that don't need to receive mail. It's also great for systems with broken Sendmail that you don't have time to fix, for debugging, etc. Nice little piece of code, I recommend it frequently.

If you check Dean's site now, you'll see that he's asking for advice about switching the code to C++. There are features he'd like to add, and C++ is his preferred language.

Not so many years ago, I would have said "Don't do that", just because having a working C++ compiler wasn't a given. But nowadays, you'd be surprised if any system with a dev kit didn't have C++ installed, so I say "sure, why not". But.. I still think he should make the old code available "just in case" - in case there's somebody with an old clunker that needs this. Don't keep it up to date, just leave it on the download page as an option.

What do you think? Don't tell me, click on over to Dean's site and tell him.

By the way - if you DO use CleanCode: kick in a little donation. This is good code that deserves your support.

Psst - Wanna work for yourself?

Comments


Mon Oct 31 20:23:08 2005: Subject:   Dean
It makes sense to me to keep the C version, but as Tony said, I'm a C++ guy... When I started the eMail project I was a full on C guy but realized that more jobs were wanting OO coders and so I went with the trend and I have fully converted myself. I always wanted eMail to be highly portable and easily configurable/compilable with as few dependencies as possible because that always frustrated me back in my early days of learning Linux. I think I have managed to maintain this throughout the project to the best of my personal ability even while making major feature enhancements. Soon, I will be adding SSL support which will break that depencency tenet that I enjoyed so much with this project... So, I figured, why not go ahead and convert the code to one I enjoy coding in much more?



Nevertheless, if the decision is to keep C and say to hell with C++, I will still reorganize the C code to be a bit more OO related.

Thanks everyone for using it and a BIG thanks to Tony for writing a review and pointing people to this small project.

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