0.9.32 plans/TODOs

Michael Deutschmann michael at talamasca.ocis.net
Sun Apr 18 06:06:02 UTC 2010


On Fri, 2 Apr 2010, Bernhard Reutner-Fischer wrote:
> - -std=gnu89 (before merge/after/not ?) I fear that certain folks
>   will wince if we (we're well in 2010 at the time of this writing and
>   C99 is the dominating standard for the majority that i'm aware of)
>   drop it, yes?

I've been there.  For awhile I was trapped at GCC 2.95.3 because further
versions required an upgrade to a GLIBC version that was too bloated.  It
was really annoying, all the programs I had to patch because of
programmers who use C++-style declarations-after-statements.  Notably, GNU
coreutils has been such a package for a long time now.

But now, I've found uClibc and all is sweetness and light, with GCC 4.4.3.

Thus, I think dropping support for C89 shouldn't be a problem, unless we
are talking about some specific feature GCC added after
declarations-after-statements-in-straight-C.  Anyone who doesn't have this
feature *knows* they have a problem.

On a related note, dropping C89 support implies dropping support for all
GCC 2.x versions, since their C99 support is deficient.  So if you're
going to break GCC 2 anyway, this offers a chance to simplify the headers
by removing special cases for old GCC.

---- Michael Deutschmann <michael at talamasca.ocis.net>


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