Herb Sutter confirms no more support for C beyond C90 in Visual C++

http://herbsutter.com/2012/05/03/reader-qa-what-about-vc-and-c99

by pjmlp • 14 years ago

49 47 14 years ago

angersock2• 14 years ago

I'm unsurprised, but still, goddamnit guys.

As one of the comments in the linked page points out, the problem with more modern C code is that it tends to be covered in GCC gunk. Without Microsoft implementing support, well, that won't get better.

Maybe one day Clang on Windows will be far enough along that Microsoft will let you use it as a VS backend.

Someone• 14 years ago

That would not solve that problem. http://clang.llvm.org/docs/LanguageExtensions.html:

"Clang aims to support a broad range of GCC extensions."

angersock2• 14 years ago

Well shit. :(

revelation• 14 years ago

Focus means saying no? Still laser focused twelve years after the fact?

Sorry, but it has always been clear that they just didn't want to invest any kind of resources at all. Not even a few days of developer time for shipping a freaking stdint.

klodolph• 14 years ago

For me, it'd be fine if MSC (Microsoft's C/C++ compiler) supported a good chunk the following features:

* 'restrict' keyword * C99 inline semantics * snprintf * flexible array members * designated initializers * UTF-8 string literals without using escape sequences * compound literals

Now I understand wanting to "focus" on C++, but some of the above are very easy. For example, you can write snprintf as a three line wrapper around _snprintf, and change the parser to accept restrict (it already accepts __restrict). One would hope that since MSC already accepts wide characters, adding UTF-8 support would be fairly trivial. (Right now, you can only put UTF-8 in string literals either by tricking the compiler into thinking that you're using an encoding OTHER than UTF-8, or by using escape sequences). I would also hope that C99 inline semantics are easy to implement.

If we had those easy things, the bigger items (designated initializers, flexible array members, and compound literals) would seem less.

mindstab• 14 years ago

Wow, they go so far as to recommend gcc if you want "new" features. ~"We won't support those features, if you want them go use a more full featured product". Kind of makes it hard to keep peddling their product in the long term if they plan to lag behind no?

eru• 14 years ago

Depends. From the article it seems they position their product as a C++ compiler. You don't expect your Haskell compiler to also do OCaml.

fusiongyro• 14 years ago

No, but I do expect my OCaml compiler to also do Caml.

mikeash3• 14 years ago

No, but I do expect Microsoft to provide a C compiler of some kind that's remotely up to date.

ArbitraryLimits2• 14 years ago

Microsoft has never seen Visual Studio as a profit center. It's just there because compilers are complements of applications that run on their system, which is a profit center. The only reason they even used to charge for it was to not kill Borland's compiler business. As long as there's a C compiler for applications on their operating system, they're happy. If someone else writes it, so much the better.

cygx3• 14 years ago

Thankfully, MSVC is not the only game in town.

I'm using GCC and Clang right now, but I'm also itching to try out Pelles C, which comes with C11 support...

bratsche• 14 years ago

But neither GCC nor Clang support Microsoft's debug symbols as far as I'm aware. If you're writing libraries for Win32, your users are likely using Visual Studio and they're going to get unhelpful stack traces without those debug symbol files.

cygx3• 14 years ago

Mixing MinGW and MSVC object files is indeed a problem as neither toolchain understands the other's debugging information.

If you can get away with it, just don't support MSVC. If that's not an option, your best bet is probably restricting yourself to the common subset of C and C++...

binarycrusader2• 14 years ago

Should have been titled" Herb Sutter confirms that Microsoft's compiler group management doesn't get it"

Even the IE team has learned the importance of implementing standards support. Way to go guys; you've only had what, 12 years to get this right?

And one of your "solutions" to your own organizational issues is to "pressure your standards committee representatives to have ISO C++ include more of the C standard (longer-term)."

Awesome! No wonder so many game developers prefer Intel's compilers.

I like the Visual Studio IDE, but this makes life so incredibly difficult for cross-platform developers.

cobrausn2• 14 years ago

They are going to conform to a standard. The C++11 standard. Conforming to the later C standards and the C++11 standard would be incompatible goals.

cdavid• 14 years ago

How would supporting both C++ and C standards be incompatible ? Every other major C/C++ compiler can do it (intel, clang, gcc, sun studio, etc…). Implementing most of the C99 features is ridiculously easy compared to C++11 (C-compatible complex numbers, C99 semantics for inline, etc…).

The sheer amount of code that can be compiled on every platform but VS because of this is very significant, especially open source ones. I have a hard time buying the resource reason to be honest.

eliben• 14 years ago

You do know that C and C++ are separate languages, right?

binarycrusader2• 14 years ago

Visual Studio provides a suite of compilers; not just a single one.

I'm asking for their C compiler to support the C99 or C11 standard.

They're not incompatible goals unless you're suggesting that they attempt to make a single compiler support both.

blahedo• 14 years ago

I'm seeing a lot of negativity here that I don't understand. The post seemed fairly well-reasoned and reasonable; the objections seem to assume that the content of the objection should be obvious. It's not obvious to me---C++ is not a superset of C, and hasn't been for some time now, although there remains a lot of overlap and cross-pollination. So why shouldn't a C++ compiler decide to just be a C++ compiler?

mikeash3• 14 years ago

I don't think there's anything wrong with having a dedicated C++ compiler. But it seems fairly crazy to me for Microsoft not to have a C compiler that's even remotely up to date. C is still an important language, and "just compile it as C++" is not a good answer.

bunderbunder4• 14 years ago

C is a very important language, but not so much among Visual Studio's target market. Windows developers tend to be rather C++-centric, and I'm guessing the biggest reason why the compiler team hasn't bothered is because there just isn't sufficient demand to justify the diversion of resources.

I'm also guessing a lot of the world's C99 code has dependencies beyond the just the compiler that Visual Studio won't support without some effort. "Just compile it as C++" is not a good answer, but I wouldn't be surprised if "just install Cygwin" often is.

ArbitraryLimits2• 14 years ago

They can get away with it because C has an ABI, so cygwin + gcc -mno-cygwin can build binaries that interoperate with Visual Studio's libc. Lots of open source projects build their Windows distributions this way - GTK for example has been doing it for about 10 years now.

yuhong• 14 years ago

In particular, C++98 and C99 was when C and C++ began to split, and obviously MS chose to implement C++98 instead of C99.

someone-else3• 14 years ago

No. It started to split with C++98, when C++ started to error on things that were valid C.

someone-else3• 14 years ago

The thing is that they haven't decided that. They decided that they're going to be a C and C++ compiler, but only for an outdated version of C.

pkmays• 14 years ago

From the Dr Dobb's link:

> The C99 standard is interesting because it was created at a time when a lot of people on the previous committee went away and did other things. And it was a smaller group that came over who were interested in a special-purpose area, and so it ended up having a lot of things that were not of general-purpose interest.

Sutter's comment seems spot on about the apparent departure of a lot of the original authors. C99 seems to have been designed by a group of people who's overriding motivation was FORTRAN envy.

Really, how many people were screaming for built-in complex types, type-generic math, or variable-length arrays? noalias even made it's way back into the language.

Take the Good Parts of C99: BCPL comments, long long, and <stdint.h>, and you've basically got MSVC's C compiler.

Good Parts of C11? Anonymous structs and unions. Plan 9 FTW.

josefonseca• 14 years ago

There must be a strategical reason behind this, I can't believe they'd make such a huge mistake.

One possibility is that they're trying to corner the native languages so developers start migrating more and more into managed runtimes. This gives Microsoft more power and control over what the programers are doing on their OS. Removing C++ would be too big a hit, so killing off C is the compromise they found.

The fact that they recommend GCC is intriguing though, I can't quite make sense of that.

pjmlp• 14 years ago

While I could agree with you, the fact is that all other compiler vendors, that are also os vendors, are able to support both languages.

So why not Microsoft?

Their only excuse is that Windows developers don't care about C99, according to their surveys.

Yet, this is one of the most requested features in Microsoft Connect.

Herb Sutter confirms no more support for C beyond C90 in Visual C++

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