On Sat, Jul 28, 2012 at 6:25 AM, Markus Armbruster <arm...@redhat.com> wrote: > Anthony Liguori <aligu...@us.ibm.com> writes: > >> Blue Swirl <blauwir...@gmail.com> writes: >> >>> On Fri, Jul 27, 2012 at 8:51 PM, Anthony Liguori <aligu...@us.ibm.com> >>> wrote: >>>> If someone comes along and actively maintains support for another >>>> compiler, we can revisit. But otherwise, there's no practical reason to >>>> avoid extensions. > > Exactly. > >>> Because it's more compliant to standards. >> >> That is not a benefit. There is no practical advantage to sticking to >> only C99. > > Agree. "Compliance to X" is means, not ends. Specifically, compliance > to C99 is not a benefit by itself. Portability to desirable targets is > one. > > Right now, the code is portable enough for our current needs. If you > find a target you wish to support where it doesn't work, patches are > welcome. > >> If we stuck to C99 only, QEMU would look very different. We wouldn't >> have type_init() so we wouldn't have the module system we use today. >> It literally took me months to get those patches merged because Paul >> made exactly the same argument you're making now. >> >> And it's really been one of the better cleanups in QEMU that we've ever >> done (using modules to define devices). > > Developing is hard enough without tying ourselves into knots to avoid > useful tools just because they haven't been blessed by the right > standards committee. Some pragmatism is in order.
IMHO it's just laziness to use easily avoidable constructs like ?: without middle expression. In most cases (as can be seen in my patch), you save typing and reviewing whopping 10-20 characters. We are in seconds range of effort. > >>> There's also very little benefit from using the nonessential >>> extensions. > > Blanket statement, needs evidence. > >> Using weak symbols eliminates #ifdefs and makes the code base a lot >> cleaner. It makes it easier to introduce architecture specific hooks in >> a clean way. >> >> Considering how messy a lot of our target-specific code is, I think >> there could be quite a significant benefit down the road. > > I don't have an informed opinion on this particular case. All I can say > here is patches are evidence.
