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by throw-qqqqq21 hours ago |
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upvoteby pjmlp21 hours ago|
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They officially saw no need for C support going forward.

https://herbsutter.com/2012/05/03/reader-qa-what-about-vc-an...

Note,

"If you really need either of the following.....then we recommend that you consider using a different compiler such as Intel or gcc (short-term) and/or pressure your standards committee representatives to have ISO C++ include more of the C standard (longer-term)."

Which is kind of why nowadays clang is part of Visual Studio as well.

However, after Satya got into the whole Microsoft <3 FOSS, this changed a bit,

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/c11-and-c17-standard-...

There are a few blogs after that, so at least up to C17 minus the optional parts from C11, the support is there.

It remains to be seen if anything C23 or later will ever come into MSVC, and then again, clang is part of VS installer.

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upvoteby throw-qqqqq19 hours ago|
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TIL, thanks for updating me on this!

I read Herb Sutter’s post many years ago, but didn’t know they had picked up the work again.

I see that VLAs are still not supported, which is a shame IMO, but the C-support seems much better than it used to be at least.

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upvoteby pjmlp16 hours ago|
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They never will, as mentioned they have decided not to support what became optional in C11.

If C23 ever comes to land on MSVC, which I have my doubts given the radio silence on C support, I assume they might add the VLAs part that made it again back into C23.

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upvoteby uecker16 hours ago|
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If you care about C, use gcc.
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upvoteby pjmlp15 hours ago|
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As proven by industry adoption of clang, that isn't an option in many platforms.

Additionally clang is driving C extensions for safety that should have long been part of the language.

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upvoteby uecker13 hours ago|
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IMHO gcc has better warnings and support for safety. Industry mostly wants a BSD-licensed toolchain. I could not care less.
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upvoteby pjmlp5 hours ago|
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GCC only recently started with its safety analysers, it doesn't do C++, and isn't as customisable as clang tidy.

Additionally it lacks the language extensions Apple and Google have been adding to clang, which remains to be seen which ever get proposed to be part of the standard.

You might care less, however as mentioned there are industry relevant platforms where GCC doesn't get to play at all, thus plenty of people do care.

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upvoteby uecker4 hours ago|
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This discussion was about C not C++. GCC also has language extensions for safety, such as the access attribute, the dynamic object size pass, and far better warnings.

Big tech cares about a lot of things of dubious value to me, the users, or developers. As a C programmer, if you want to write modern and safe C, my recommendation is to use gcc.

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