On Sun, Nov 14 2021, brian m. carlson wrote: [Replying to this tidbit in the v1 CL, which isn't in the V2 one] > Unfortunately, Microsoft for many years refused[1] to support C99 in > MSVC, and still does not officially do so. However, they recently added > support for C11 and C17, which are sufficient for modern programming. > These require a newer version of MSVC, including an updated SDK. The > SDK update is available for download free of charge, and most public CI > systems have support for both the updated MSVC and the SDK update. > > Even for users who would like to target an older version of Windows, > such as the no longer supported Windows 7, GCC and Clang are available. > The LLVM suite, including Clang, is available pre-compiled for download > free of charge. Using a different compiler is specifically proposed by > Microsoft staff[1] as a solution for users who wish to build modern > programs for MSVC versions which do not support modern C. > > As such, we can assume that Git can be safely compiled with C99 or C11 > support on all operating systems which receive security support, and > even some which do not. Our CI confirms that this series passes all > tests. Let's introduce a test balloon which checks for this support and > fails with an error message if it is absent. > > [0] The reader will note that there are people working professionally in > this industry who were not yet born at the time C99 was ratified. Thus, > this occurred quite a long time ago indeed. > [1] https://herbsutter.com/2012/05/03/reader-qa-what-about-vc-and-c99/ I hadn't seen that blog post before I'd read it when going over your series. I'd assumed that Microsoft was just dragging their feed on C language support, but that post indicates (from what seems to be as official of a source as anyone's going to get) that they're intending to not support C at all, but just some pseudo-C that happens to be a convenient subset of C++. However that post is from 2012, and you indicate that they've since added (full?) support for C11 and C17. So is this "policy" of supporting some arbitrary subset of C++ at all current as far as MSVC today goes? Aside: I just remembered we had a (seemingly abandoned) effort to get git's sources to compile with a C++ compiler[1], which would be another possible way forward to using more modern C features that happened to overlap with C++. Another one would be some sort of coccinelle-powered refactoring or other source pre-processing... 1. https://lore.kernel.org/git/20180129223728.30569-1-bmwill@xxxxxxxxxx/
