On Thu, Jun 1, 2023 at 3:52 PM Alejandro Colomar via Gcc-help <gcc-help@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > I was just wondering if there are any plans to drop support of C89 (and > gnu89) at any point in the future. I didn't find any such discussion in > the mailing list. > > That change would probably break very ancient code (implicit int, implicit > function declarations, ...), but such code is very likely to have been > updated in the last several decades to be at least compatible with C99, so > I don't expect that much breakage. > > Most big projects have already migrated, with only a few still resisting > (curl comes to mind). But again, I think they use a subset that would > compile under C99 with little or no modification. > > I guess supporting C89 keeps a lot of extra complexity in GCC's source code > itself, and maybe even hinders some optimizations. We just had a long thread in which several people objected strongly to just making the use of certain old C constructs an error by default (https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2023-May/241264.html). If there are strong objections to making these constructs into errors, I think there would be even stronger objections to removing support for C89 entirely. Ian
