On 19 August 2023 12:37:23 am NZST, "Страхиња Радић" <cont...@strahinja.org> wrote: >I haven't checked recently, but the most noticeable missing feature of cproc, >as well as some other compilers, were VLAs. When someone writes the support >for >VLAs, cproc & co. will become much more usable.
VLAs are optional in the latest C standards and didn't exist at all in C89. They are a misfeature, at least when put on the stack. They're quite useful as a type system feature for index and size calculations though. >The simpler compilers generally work for smaller projects, but for many >existing packages, for now there is no real alternative to GCC and Clang/LLVM. Sadly, this is true. Most software seems to use some extensions from GCC. The only reason clang is usable is that it tries to be bug-compatible with GNU extensions. Something we can all do is try to patch software to be more compatible. If you know that there is software out there that could use only standardised features but uses GNU extensions unnecessarily, consider submitting a patch. That would be better than bloating these small compilers by adding all of GNU's bad ideas. Unfortunately, some people (*cough* systemd *cough*) deliberately use non-standard features in incompatible ways with the object of being incompatible, and for no other reason. But most programmers are saner than that, I think. This would also help those developers: other compilers tend to compile a lot faster than GCC/clang, at the cost of optimisations that are probably turned off during development anyway. Have a nice day, M.
