I'm seeing a lot of negativity here that I don't understand. The post seemed fairly well-reasoned and reasonable; the objections seem to assume that the content of the objection should be obvious. It's not obvious to me---C++ is not a superset of C, and hasn't been for some time now, although there remains a lot of overlap and cross-pollination. So why shouldn't a C++ compiler decide to just be a C++ compiler?
Herb Sutter confirms no more support for C beyond C90 in Visual C++
11–20 of 53 posts
Re: Herb Sutter confirms no more support for C beyond C90 in Visual C++
#12Thankfully, MSVC is not the only game in town. I'm using GCC and Clang right now, but I'm also itching to try out Pelles C, which comes with C11 support...
But neither GCC nor Clang support Microsoft's debug symbols as far as I'm aware. If you're writing libraries for Win32, your users are likely using Visual Studio and they're going to get unhelpful stack traces without those debug symbol files.
Re: Herb Sutter confirms no more support for C beyond C90 in Visual C++
#13Should 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 (lon…
They are going to conform to a standard. The C++11 standard. Conforming to the later C standards and the C++11 standard would be incompatible goals.
Re: Herb Sutter confirms no more support for C beyond C90 in Visual C++
#14Should 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 (lon…
They are going to conform to a standard. The C++11 standard. Conforming to the later C standards and the C++11 standard would be incompatible goals.
How would supporting both C++ and C standards be incompatible ? Every other major C/C++ compiler can do it (intel, clang, gcc, sun studio, etc…). Implementing most of the C99 features is ridiculously easy compared to C++11 (C-compatible complex numbers, C99 semantics for inline, etc…).
The sheer amount of code that can be compiled on every platform but VS because of this is very significant, especially open source ones. I have a hard time buying the resource reason to be honest.
Re: Herb Sutter confirms no more support for C beyond C90 in Visual C++
#15I'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.
That would not solve that problem. http://clang.llvm.org/docs/LanguageExtensions.html:
"Clang aims to support a broad range of GCC extensions."
Re: Herb Sutter confirms no more support for C beyond C90 in Visual C++
#16I'm seeing a lot of negativity here that I don't understand. The post seemed fairly well-reasoned and reasonable; the objections seem to assume that the content of the objection should be obvious. It's not obvious to me---C++ is not a superset of C, and hasn't been for some time now, although there remains a lot of overlap and cross-pollination. So why shouldn't a C++ compiler decide to just be a C++ compiler?
I don't think there's anything wrong with having a dedicated C++ compiler. But it seems fairly crazy to me for Microsoft not to have a C compiler that's even remotely up to date. C is still an important language, and "just compile it as C++" is not a good answer.
Re: Herb Sutter confirms no more support for C beyond C90 in Visual C++
#17Wow, they go so far as to recommend gcc if you want "new" features. ~"We won't support those features, if you want them go use a more full featured product". Kind of makes it hard to keep peddling their product in the long term if they plan to lag behind no?
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.
No, but I do expect Microsoft to provide a C compiler of some kind that's remotely up to date.
Re: Herb Sutter confirms no more support for C beyond C90 in Visual C++
#18Should 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 (lon…
They are going to conform to a standard. The C++11 standard. Conforming to the later C standards and the C++11 standard would be incompatible goals.
You do know that C and C++ are separate languages, right?
Re: Herb Sutter confirms no more support for C beyond C90 in Visual C++
#19Thankfully, MSVC is not the only game in town. I'm using GCC and Clang right now, but I'm also itching to try out Pelles C, which comes with C11 support...
But neither GCC nor Clang support Microsoft's debug symbols as far as I'm aware. If you're writing libraries for Win32, your users are likely using Visual Studio and they're going to get unhelpful stack traces without those debug symbol files.
Mixing MinGW and MSVC object files is indeed a problem as neither toolchain understands the other's debugging information.
If you can get away with it, just don't support MSVC. If that's not an option, your best bet is probably restricting yourself to the common subset of C and C++...
Re: Herb Sutter confirms no more support for C beyond C90 in Visual C++
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are going to conform to a standard. The C++11 standard. Conforming to the later C standards and the C++11 standard would be incompatible goals.
How would supporting both C++ and C standards be incompatible ? Every other major C/C++ compiler can do it (intel, clang, gcc, sun studio, etc…). Implementing most of the C99 features is ridiculously easy compared to C++11 (C-compatible complex numbers, C99 semantics for inline, etc…). The sheer amount of code that can be compiled on every platform but VS because of this is very significant, especially open source on…
The sheer amount of code that can be compiled on every platform but VS because of this is. . .
. . . not actually very much. Visual Studio can use Intel's compiler, and perhaps others.