>>39
Please check all Google software which is Linux-only and that which is Windows-only. You will see shortly the latter outnumbers the former by wide margin. Google knows their users OS preferences. This project looks like sponsored hobby-work - not a Google project.
You are *incredibly* wrong. ALL of Google's core technology runs on Linux only. We're talking about their scrapers, all their algorithms e.g. MapReduce, PageRank, etc., all their websites include GMail, all of their servers, etc. Millions upon millions of lines of code, none of it ported to Windows.
Only about 1% of their software development is meant to run on end-user machines. Lately this is Google Desktop and Chrome, both of which run on all of Windows, Linux and Mac.
Pointer are fast, small and versatile:
So are array indices. In fact, a) on modern processors, indexing an array is the same speed and memory overhead as stepping using pointer arithmetic (the faq mentions this in fact), and b) these are interchangeable; a good compiler can switch array indexing to pointer arithmetic on its own (and still retain bounds checking).
Also, why on earth would you want to do polymorphism on your own when the language provides a facility for this already? And not just any facility, but the best and safest we know: implicit conversion to any implemented interface. Static duck typing. You do know that this is just a v-table under the hood, right? In fact if you do it by hand, you're doing EXACTLY what the compiler would just do for you.