On Wed, Feb 16, 2022 at 10:10:01AM +0000, Bruce Richardson wrote: > On Wed, Feb 16, 2022 at 11:05:09AM +0100, Morten Brørup wrote: > > > From: Bruce Richardson [mailto:bruce.richard...@intel.com] > > > Sent: Wednesday, 16 February 2022 10.33 > > > > > > On Tue, Feb 15, 2022 at 03:00:56PM -0800, Stephen Hemminger wrote: > > > > Yet another case of applying Linux kernel best practices > > > > to DPDK. Flexible arrays are supported by Clang, GCC and > > > > Microsoft compilers (part of C99). > > > > > > > Do we need to start explicitly stating that DPDK uses C99 features, and > > > adding -std=c99 to our build flags? Are we also requiring that > > > applications > > > are compiled with c99 features to use this (I would hope that they are, > > > but > > > I'm not sure we can mandate it). > > > > No to -std=c99. It's >= C99 for applications; we should not prevent them > > from using a newer C standard. > > Yes. For build flags, I was referring only to having it in the cflags for the > build of DPDK itself, not for apps. We definitely need to minimise the > build flags we expose to apps. > > > > > Adding a note about the C standard version to the DPDK requirements > > documentation would be very nice. It only mentions a certain compiler > > version required. But I think that documenting the detailed build and > > runtime requirements (and why they are that way) is another task. > > > Sure, we should do that. I am just wanting to be sure that if we specify a > minimum of C99, we won't get complaints back from those with legacy > codebasees which only support C89/C90. I am therefore wondering if we need > to have our public headers C90-compliant?
this seems to be the real question. what "minimum" C standard should be documented as required to consume dpdk. we can obviously use any standard we wish to build/provide binaries. similarly we ought to document a minimum C++ standard for consumption. i would advocate for C99 however before setting that in stone it is fair to ask if there are any consumers using < C99. we may also want to consider that the minimum required may differ depending on the platform/port. though most differences in public interface i would hope could be trivially abstracted though. ty
