Herb Sutter confirms no more support for C beyond C90 in Visual C++

I'm unsurprised, but still, goddamnit guys.

As one of the comments in the linked page points out, the problem with more modern C code is that it tends to be covered in GCC gunk. Without Microsoft implementing support, well, that won't get better.

Maybe one day Clang on Windows will be far enough along that Microsoft will let you use it as a VS backend.

For me, it'd be fine if MSC (Microsoft's C/C++ compiler) supported a good chunk the following features:

* 'restrict' keyword * C99 inline semantics * snprintf * flexible array members * designated initializers * UTF-8 string literals without using escape sequences * compound literals

Now I understand wanting to "focus" on C++, but some of the above are very easy. For example, you can write snprintf as a three line wrapper around _snprintf, and change the parser to accept restrict (it already accepts __restrict). One would hope that since MSC already accepts wide characters, adding UTF-8 support would be fairly trivial. (Right now, you can only put UTF-8 in string literals either by tricking the compiler into thinking that you're using an encoding OTHER than UTF-8, or by using escape sequences). I would also hope that C99 inline semantics are easy to implement.

If we had those easy things, the bigger items (designated initializers, flexible array members, and compound literals) would seem less.

Depends. From the article it seems they position their product as a C++ compiler. You don't expect your Haskell compiler to also do OCaml.

Microsoft has never seen Visual Studio as a profit center. It's just there because compilers are complements of applications that run on their system, which is a profit center. The only reason they even used to charge for it was to not kill Borland's compiler business. As long as there's a C compiler for applications on their operating system, they're happy. If someone else writes it, so much the better.

Should have been titled" Herb Sutter confirms that Microsoft's compiler group management doesn't get it"

Even the IE team has learned the importance of implementing standards support. Way to go guys; you've only had what, 12 years to get this right?

And one of your "solutions" to your own organizational issues is to "pressure your standards committee representatives to have ISO C++ include more of the C standard (longer-term)."

Awesome! No wonder so many game developers prefer Intel's compilers.

I like the Visual Studio IDE, but this makes life so incredibly difficult for cross-platform developers.