Tested on Windows: compiles fine and symbol parsing still works. I did not perform more testing than this. Will test on Linux in daily use from now on.
Also did a short code review on the non-ctags core changes and they are fine to me. I'd vote for quickly merging this PR, to get more testing by having it in master.
@techee could you squash some commits or re-push the last commit, e.g. with: `git ci --amend --no-edit && git push origin ctags_updatep5.9.20211031.0 --force` to trigger Travis CI (it is working again).