I am about to delve into kernel land. My question relates to the programming language. I have seen most tutorials to be written in C. I currently program in C++ and Assembly. I also studied C before C++, but I didn't use it a lot. Would it be possible to program in kernel mode using simplistic C++without using any advanced constructs? Basically I am trying to avoid the minor differences that exist between the two languages(like no bool in C, no automatic returning of 0 from main, really minor differences). I won't be using templates, classes and the like. So would it be possible to program in kernel mode using simplistic C++ without any major annoyances?
Even if not officially supported, you can use C++ as the development language for Windows kernel development. You should be aware of the following things :
you MUST define the new and delete operator to map to ExAllocatePoolWithTag and ExFreePool.
try to avoid virtual functions. It seems not possible to control the location of the vtable of the object and this may have unexpected results if it is in a pageable portion and you code is called with IRQL >= DISPATCH_LEVEL.
if you still need to use virtual methods table than lock .rdata segment before using it on IRQL >= DISPATCH_LEVEL.
Apart from these kinds of limitations, you can use C++ for your driver development.