On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 12:22 PM, Sturla Molden <sturla.molden@gmail.com> wrote:

Brett Cannon <brett@python.org> wrote:

> The Visual Studio team has publicly stated they will never support C99,
> so dropping C89 blindly is going to alienate a big part of our user base
> unless we switch to C++ instead. I'm fine with trying to pull in C99
> features, though, that we can somehow support in a backwards-compatible way with VS.

So you are saying that Python should use "the C that Visual Studio
supports"?

Well, C89 + Amendments which happens to be what all C compilers support, including VS.

I believe Microsoft is not competent to define the C standard.

Maybe, but they still control a large install base.

If they cannot provide a compiler that is their bad.

And unfortunately ours if we want Windows developers to be able to use CPython for things like embedding,

There are plenty of
other standard-compliant compilers we can use, including Intel, clang and
gcc (MinGW).

You manage to convince a majority of Windows developers to switch compilers and then I would be happy to promote we drop VS support and switch entirely to C99. Until then, though, this is like suggesting we cut off Windows XP because MS doesn't have long-term support anymore: it's a choice between being pragmatic for serving our install base or doing something to simplify our lives.