On Tue, Jun 7, 2016 at 12:37 PM, Sturla Molden <sturla.molden@gmail.com> wrote:
Victor Stinner <victor.stinner@gmail.com> wrote:
Is it worth to support a compiler that in 2016 doesn't support the C standard released in 1999, 17 years ago?
MSVC only supports C99 when its needed for C++11 or some MS extension to C.
Is it worth supporting MSVC? If not, we have Intel C, Clang and Cygwin GCC are the viable options we have on Windows (and perhaps Embarcadero, but I haven't used C++ builder for a very long time). Even MinGW does not fully support C99, because it depends on Microsoft's CRT. If we think MSVC and MinGW are worth supporting, we cannot just use C99 indiscriminantly.
No-one's proposing to use C99 indiscriminately; AFAICT the proposal was: it would make a big difference if the CPython core could start using some of C99's basic features like long long, inline functions, and mid-block declarations, and all interesting compilers support these, so let's officially switch from C89-only to C89-plus-the-bits-of-C99-that-MSVC-supports. This would be a big improvement and is just a matter of recognizing the status quo; no need to drag in anything controversial. There's no chance that CPython is going to drop MSVC support in 3.6. Intel C is hardly a viable option given that the license requires the people running the compiler to accept unbounded liability for Intel lawyer bills and imposes non-DFSG-free conditions on the compiled output. And Cygwin GCC isn't even real Windows. Maybe switching to Clang will make sense in 3.7 but that's a long ways off... -n -- Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org