On Sat, 17 Aug 2013 02:19:17 -0700 Matthew Brush mbrush@codebrainz.ca wrote:
Up till now we've tried to stay compatible with ANSI C89 because of GTK+-stack doing so (unless I missed the real reason?).
I propose we update to allowing C99 for the following reasons:
[...]
IMHO, Colomban summed up pretty well why there's no compelling reason to adopt C99. My 2 euro-cents:
1. Code with gboolean and bool, as well as g_ and non-g_ function versions, would be ugly. So, if we are to move, we'd better upgdate everything at once. Though it won't be very nice to have glib/gtk+ callbacks documented as "... gboolean something ...", but implemented with "bool".
2. If you think that everyone who completed university in the last 14 years uses C99, that's not quite the case. There were years of time lag before all compilers implemented it, and there would be an even larger lag until the programs started before the stable C99 implementation are re-written or obsoleted - if ever. The business is conservative, and does not like to spend money for nothing. On that note, let's cheer for all the programmers using MSVC, pretty much the standard C/C++ compiler for Windows: VS moved "closer" to C99! A month ago, that is. :)