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I am very interrogative and perplexed by this commit on android's dalvik platform pushed a year ago.
File extensions were changed to C++ extensions in order to "move the interpreter into C++" - use the compiler's C++ front-end.
What could be the benefits of this change ? Dalvik Platform is a 100% C & asm project and not any C++ feature is used.
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GCC is a toolchain that compiles code, links it with any library dependencies, converts that code to assembly, and then prepares executable files. It follows the standard UNIX design philosophy of using simple tools that perform individual tasks well.
GCC stands for GNU Compiler Collections which is used to compile mainly C and C++ language. It can also be used to compile Objective C and Objective C++.
G++ is the name of the compiler. (Note: G++ also compiles C++ code, but since C is directly compatible with C++, so we can use it.).
I can only speculate, but considering how the Android system has grown in complexity, the scoping features of C++ (classes and namespaces) might make the code base more manageable.
EDIT
Even if the project doesn't currently make use of any C++ features, they may simply be planning ahead.
Apart from some minor differences (namely some parameter conventions most people avoid anyway), C source code compiles as C++ without modification. That being said, in some areas C++ syntax is stricter than C (C allows you to assign a void pointer to another pointer type without a cast; in C++, this is an error), and enforcing this strictness avoids problems down the road.
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*) (That's an overly simplistic view, see comment)
One further reason for the change may be that because most modern development favors C++ over C, a richer set of tools is available.
Speculating again, but at the birth of Android C may have been the only viable option for embedded device development, and now that restriction is no longer an issue.
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