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Re: C99

From: Emil Engler via curl-library <curl-library_at_lists.haxx.se>
Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2022 17:05:36 +0200

On Tue, Sep 20, 2022 at 11:24:37AM +0200, Daniel Stenberg via curl-library wrote:
> I am not entirely convinced we want to go all-in and totally crazy on all
> these fronts immediately, and I think having an idea what we want in terms
> of code style is a good idea to have thought about before the flood gates
> open.

While I'm not against a switch to C99, I consider most of the features
introduced by it, to put it mildly, useless. Sure, some things of it
are very useful and cannot be achieved by ease in C89, such as
<stdint.h> and variadic macros, but most of the other features, such as
<stdbool.h> and snprintf(3) can be implemeneted in C89 fairly easy and
given the fact that curl already does that, as it has its own boolean
type and printf(3)-functions, it's questionable if we should truly favor
them to the cost of a slightly worser portability.

A thing we could also do, would be to use C89 with GNU C Extensions
(GNU89), but only make use of the GNU Extensions, which are also part of
the C99 standard, as they have a big intersection with each other. With
this approach, we can make use of certain C99 features without dropping
portability for certain gcc versions. If I remember correctly, SQLite
does exactly this.

--Emil
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Received on 2022-09-20