Is C or C++ better for making portable code?

Question

I am trying to have some fun in summer. Writing a piece of code that enables presenting Arabic language in systems that support Unicode but no support for eastern languages it. I am writing only the logic hopefully with no integration code initially.

Should I use C++ or C?

Which is the easier language to write portable code and easier to integrate with Python possibly?

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Edit:

I am fairly good with C/C++ though I consider myself closer to C++. But It seems it is easier to write C and plug it every where or I am wrong ? I would write some functions to process Arabic Unicode String. presenting Arabic language need some processing because ALMOST ALL characters have different shapes in different contexts.

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Edit:

It seems I will go with C++, just to make it more fun.

Answer 1

I would use C++, mostly because it provides a lot more "stuff" to use and as far as my experience goes is as portable as C. However, I have not used straight C/C compiler for 10 years or more.

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EDIT

A commenter questioned my experience with portability. Mine is limited to Linux and Win32 primarily. I assumed this would be sufficient OSes for this exercise.

Answer 2

If it's for fun, go for the language you want to learn better.

I'd bet that there are more recent libraries to support various language packs in C++, but maybe that's part of the fun, is to write your own version in C.

Answer 3

Either one of C or C++ should enable you to write portable code if you're careful. For Unicode handling, you will likely also want a Unicode-aware string facility; for C, Glib can be quite useful.

Of course, you could just write it in Python from the beginning. That is reasonably portable, and probably easiest.

Answer 4

Try to see next sites:

"boost.org/" (see the integration with python)

or

"pocoproject.org/"

Both sites seems to have the sympathy of Stroustrup, the creator of C++

Answer 5

You need robust library support. For that, C++ has more rich options. If you use a framework like QT it will be almost trivial. It's also very portable over all systems. Integrating with Python is also straightforward (though for that I like boost::python).

Answer 6

I think it is better to write in C.Because C will provide you more ways of producing optimized and portable code than C++.If you do it in C then it will be easier to integrate with python.

Answer 7

I would write it in C++ and provide a C interface to get the widest possible integration footprint. Also, you can use SWIG to generate wrappers to many common languages.

Answer 8

I strongly disagree with the assertion that C and C++ are comparable when portability is a concern. True, if you limit yourself to recent Visual Studio and g++, C++ is "portable". But things like boost are a maintenance nightmare if you care about more platforms than that (older gcc/visual studio, many other old compilers on proprietary unices). In this context, C is much more portable than C++ in my experience. If you look at most open source projects which use C++ (mozilla, some google code) , they limit themselves to a very restricted subset of C++.

Now, for strings handling, I would say that both C and C++ are quite bad languages :) I would certainly look at something much higher level, with good support for unicode string handling.