Herb Sutter confirms no more support for C beyond C90 in Visual C++ • Hacker News Board

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

#51

Post by josefonseca » Fri, May 04, 2012, 2:52 AM UTC

There must be a strategical reason behind this, I can't believe they'd make such a huge mistake.

One possibility is that they're trying to corner the native languages so developers start migrating more and more into managed runtimes. This gives Microsoft more power and control over what the programers are doing on their OS. Removing C++ would be too big a hit, so killing off C is the compromise they found.

The fact that they recommend GCC is intriguing though, I can't quite make sense of that.

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

#52

Post by binarycrusader » Fri, May 04, 2012, 5:55 AM UTC

cobrausn wrote: post #13

binarycrusader wrote: post #10

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 (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.

Visual Studio provides a suite of compilers; not just a single one.

I'm asking for their C compiler to support the C99 or C11 standard.

They're not incompatible goals unless you're suggesting that they attempt to make a single compiler support both.

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

#53

Post by pjmlp » Fri, May 04, 2012, 7:25 AM UTC

josefonseca wrote: post #51

There must be a strategical reason behind this, I can't believe they'd make such a huge mistake. One possibility is that they're trying to corner the native languages so developers start migrating more and more into managed runtimes. This gives Microsoft more power and control over what the programers are doing on their OS. Removing C++ would be too big a hit, so killing off C is the compromise they found. The fact t…

While I could agree with you, the fact is that all other compiler vendors, that are also os vendors, are able to support both languages.

So why not Microsoft?

Their only excuse is that Windows developers don't care about C99, according to their surveys.

Yet, this is one of the most requested features in Microsoft Connect.