At 2025-09-19T09:48:29+0200, Alejandro Colomar wrote: > I'm amazed how libc implementations have not added these things in > such a long time. ANSI C brought good and bad things, and this > freezing was one of the bad ones.
They had some help from Dennis Ritchie. From what I've read, he was a force favoring total inertia after C89, and pointedly had very little comment once C99 came out, sitting out a third edition of his book with Kernighan. Maybe his reasons were good ones, but I'd have to see them to judge. I personally like virtually everything that C99 brought to the table. > I'm also amazed how a large amount of programmers will continue using > strcmp(3) raw instead of adding their own trivial wrappers. I can tell you why I do it--accessibility and familiarity to newcomers or drive-by contributors. Same reason you want me to get rid of `array_length()` in favor of `countof()`. I admit, though, that groff doesn't get many drive-by contributors. > Code doesn't become less portable by defining useful macros and > functions. No, but it can become less familiar and less immediately apprehensible by already seasoned C/C++ programmers. > Agree. And that goes both ways. I think there's people that should > be there and isn't. More specifically, I think there should be > representation of the civilized world (glibc, musl, FreeBSD, NetBSD, > OpenBSD, and POSIX). The Austin Group (POSIX, more or less) liaises with WG14 already. You can find evidence of this in their teleconference minutes. As for the others, have you tried reaching out to principals of these libcs and asking them to participate? Are you *sure* they aren't already? I think Joseph Myers is both a GCC committer and a WG14 member. I grant there's a distinction in emphasis between compiler vendors and standard library vendors. But TTBOMK it's not the case that members of the Free Software C ecosystem are wholly unrepresented. > I understand you can't ask much of volunteers, but I think at least > one maintainer of each of those projects should participate in the > committee. I think what they're doing now, which is not innovating > due to fears of collision with the committee, and taking blindly > almost everything that the committee produces, is harmful to the > language. If I'm not mistaken above, ask Joseph for his take. > Either they should be in the committee, or if they truly believe the > committee has lost its mind, they should sit together in a table, and > fork C into POSIX C, ignoring anything produced by the WG14. A split like W3C and WHATWG would be costly. One shouldn't ever rule it out, but before seriously pursuing it (publicly) you want a lengthy list of concrete and specific grievances first, one where the standards body has demonstrably and documentably refused to act, or an executive panel of some sort has overridden consensus. The U.S. Declaration of Independence is this sort of document. :) I followed the C23 ratification process fairly closely (observing the giant spreadsheets they used to track feedback from the ISO balloting process). The impression I formed was that the national standards bodies (NBs) were much stronger forces resisting change than vendors were, and particularly so with respect to the cutting of dead weight (like trigraphs). Of course, that doesn't mean that vendors weren't pulling the strings of the NBs. Remember OpenOffice XML? Regards, Branden
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