Re: QEMU headers in C++

["Daniel P. Berrangé" <berrange@redhat.com>]

On Wed, May 01, 2024 at 09:40:16PM -0700, Roman Kiryanov wrote:
> Hi QEMU,
> 
> I work in Android Studio Emulator and we would like to develop devices
> in C++. Unfortunately, QEMU headers cannot be used with C++ as is
> (e.g. they use C++ keywords as variable names or implicitly cast void*
> to T*).

NB, in recent past QEMU explicitly eliminated almost[1] all C++ code from
the tree, because the consensus was to be exlcusively a C project. 

> Will QEMU be open to accept patches from us to make QEMU headers C++
> compatible?

Personally I think that'd be a retrograde step. Any downstream development
fork that made use of that facility would be not be able to feed changes
/ additions back into upstream QEMU codebase at a later date, without QEMU
accepting C++ code once again.

We'll never control what forks can do, and many will never feed back code
regardless, but IMHO we should be steering external developers in a way
that keeps open the door for their changes to be merged back upstream.

With regards,
Daniel

[1] Only some minor windows installer code remains C++.
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