A g++ extension for supporting nontrivial designated initializers

The contemporary software systems written in C face maintainability issues because of tight coupling. Introducing OO can address these problems by raising the abstraction to objects, thereby providing better programmability and under-standability. However, compiling a C software with a C++ compiler is difficult because of the incompatibilities between C and C++. This paper presents solution to one such incompatibility, nontrivial designated initializers for initializing structures and arrays by extending g++ compiler. Our approach paves the way for converting a large C based software into C++. We demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed extension with a case study of Linux kernel. © 2012 American Institute of Physics.