On Sat, 14 May 2011, Marc Balmer wrote: > What is the current state of C99 vs. older Cs? Do all arches / > compilers we have support C99? I assume gcc, llvm/clang are safe, but > what about pcc wrt C99? > > I'd like a short clarification here, since this might influence my > coding... tnx.
pcc is a C99 compiler (with some gcc compatibility) which is still under development, though C99 feature support is complete. pcc is capable of building large parts of userland (I am running with /bin, /sbin and /usr/bin currently, and am going to install /usr/sbin soon), plus i386 kernels though there are still bugs to track down (eg no system crash but a build.sh failed, I think due to some corrupted files..) I'm thinking that though we have some support for C99 in tree, the 'official' position is that llvm/clang and pcc are not yet supported (eg there has been no such announcement of support, llvm/clang source is not yet in tree and the in-tree pcc is a year out of date). So IMO, apart from style issues (which it would be nice to update the share/misc/style document with), it should be safe to use any C99 features and, excepting some of the build tools which may be needed for bootstrapping, I don't think its useful to restrict ourselves to an older standard.. iain