...
- They created a TCP/IP stack. In C++. It was
an interesting research project.
I felt pity for the poor folks at IBM who actually had to take that code and
make it work. I think eventually, they (the IBMers) gave up and took a version
of the BSD stack and put the appropriate wrappers around it and called it a day.
I actually have a coworker who came up with a pretty inventive way
of making a TCP/IP stack run efficiently in C++. It exploited the
virtual dispatch for polymorphic objects to essentially run each
connection as a dynamically recast object. From what I understand,
it actually ran OK on the embedded devices it was meant for, though
I'm not sure I would have wanted to debug it.
Crazy! Ocaml is much more sensible (and likely simpler, faster and more
maintainable as a bonus):