The goal of this ticket is to make WiredTiger compilable as C++.

The WT code-base would very much stay C, with C coding standards - just also compilable as C+. C+ specific features could only be used in non-mergable POCs to explore/demonstrate the potential benefits.

I understand that compiling WT as C++ has been done before at Skunkworks (AlexC, I think), but as the results were never merged, they are no longer very useful. My idea is to create a branch and get WT compiling in C++ on it with absolutely the minimal changes (mainly to CMake files, I hope) but also to make the code compatible with both languages (but still very much following the C coding style).

A simple concrete example: a void* can be implicitly cast in C to another pointer type, but in C++ it must be explicitly cast - adding that cast to the code would make the code compatible with both C and C++.

Hopefully we can then agree to a set of changes that could be merged, and keep the code compilable (and checked in Evergreen) in both languages going forward.

While C remains the ‘official’ WT language, I also hope that we can, over time, also turn on the stricter checking of C++ to help us improve our code.