On Tue, Jun 7, 2016 at 12:37 PM, Sturla Molden <sturla.mol...@gmail.com> wrote: > Victor Stinner <victor.stin...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> Is it worth to support a compiler that in 2016 doesn't support the C >> standard released in 1999, 17 years ago? > > MSVC only supports C99 when its needed for C++11 or some MS extension to C. > > Is it worth supporting MSVC? If not, we have Intel C, Clang and Cygwin GCC > are the viable options we have on Windows (and perhaps Embarcadero, but I > haven't used C++ builder for a very long time). Even MinGW does not fully > support C99, because it depends on Microsoft's CRT. If we think MSVC and > MinGW are worth supporting, we cannot just use C99 indiscriminantly.
No-one's proposing to use C99 indiscriminately; AFAICT the proposal was: it would make a big difference if the CPython core could start using some of C99's basic features like long long, inline functions, and mid-block declarations, and all interesting compilers support these, so let's officially switch from C89-only to C89-plus-the-bits-of-C99-that-MSVC-supports. This would be a big improvement and is just a matter of recognizing the status quo; no need to drag in anything controversial. There's no chance that CPython is going to drop MSVC support in 3.6. Intel C is hardly a viable option given that the license requires the people running the compiler to accept unbounded liability for Intel lawyer bills and imposes non-DFSG-free conditions on the compiled output. And Cygwin GCC isn't even real Windows. Maybe switching to Clang will make sense in 3.7 but that's a long ways off... -n -- Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
