Re: [dev] C variants, compilers and completeness

From: Miles Rout <miles_AT_rout.nz>
Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2023 11:28:20 +1200

On 19 August 2023 12:37:23 am NZST, "Страхиња Радић" <contact_AT_strahinja.org> wrote:
>I haven't checked recently, but the most noticeable missing feature of cproc,
>as well as some other compilers, were VLAs. When someone writes the support for
>VLAs, cproc & co. will become much more usable.

VLAs are optional in the latest C standards and
 didn't exist at all in C89. They are a misfeature,
 at least when put on the stack. They're quite
 useful as a type system feature for index and
 size calculations though.

>The simpler compilers generally work for smaller projects, but for many
>existing packages, for now there is no real alternative to GCC and Clang/LLVM.

Sadly, this is true. Most software seems to use
 some extensions from GCC. The only reason
 clang is usable is that it tries to be
 bug-compatible with GNU extensions.

Something we can all do is try to patch software
 to be more compatible. If you know that there is
 software out there that could use only
 standardised features but uses GNU extensions
 unnecessarily, consider submitting a patch.
 That would be better than bloating these small
 compilers by adding all of GNU's bad ideas.

Unfortunately, some people (*cough* systemd
 *cough*) deliberately use non-standard features
 in incompatible ways with the object of being
 incompatible, and for no other reason. But most
 programmers are saner than that, I think.

This would also help those developers: other
 compilers tend to compile a lot faster than
 GCC/clang, at the cost of optimisations that
 are probably turned off during development
 anyway.

Have a nice day,
M.
Received on Sun Aug 20 2023 - 01:28:20 CEST