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0 pointsalerighi3y ago0 comments

In reality, who cares of what the C spec says? Unless you have to port code on different compilers (which is very unlikely, unless you are building a library meant to be shared with different projects) you only care about the fact that the code works correctly with the compiler you choose to use.

I don't get all the programmers that scandalize if you use GNU extensions, they are fine, and mostly useful, so if you are using GCC to program I don't see why not use -std=gnu11 instead of -std=c11... who cares if the program is not compliant?

Even if you want to be compliant to share code, the C standard is you last problem, the thing is that you probably use a ton of libraries and header files specific to that implementation (such as POSIX or even worse Linux-specific stuff), so your code is 99% not portable anyway without rewriting most of it.

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andreareina3y ago· 1 in thread

It’s all well and good until someone else wants to compile it on clang[1]. There’s a lot of value in C being a lingua franca of sorts, and that depends on a cross-implementation understanding of semantics, i.e. standards, (though that doesn’t have to be from whatever official body that produced C99 etc).

[1] IIRC on OSX[2] gcc actually invokes clang

[2] stopped upgrading before it became macOS

astrange3y ago

Clang implements nearly all GCC extensions. (No nested functions.)

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