I strongly disagree. C should is adding langauge features at a pace other languages could stand to emulate. C is stable, trusted, and supported everywhere for this very reason. Codebases should not be using extensions, and Linux is wrong to do so.
Poppycock. Codebases should use any and all tools available to them to accomplish their goals, given the tradeoffs. Using non-standard language extensions is a tradeoff, and if it suits the Linux community and their goals, there's nothing wrong with that.
Just as human languages evolve as people use and adjust it, programming languages evolve as people start trying to change it to better suit their needs.
The difference with human languages and programming ones is that there's a relatively easy process to get everyone in sync on how it changes for programming languages. :)
I also agree with the grandparent comment that more features should be specified and incorporated into the C standard. The fact they exist and are in wide use says a lot all by itself.
Remember the Vasa! ;)
> C is stable, trusted, and supported everywhere for this very reason.
See the sibling comment about C not being fully supported everywhere. As long as people continue to make proprietary compilers, there will be implementation deficiencies. That's orthogonal to the language itself.
> Codebases should not be using extensions,
Agree and disagree. Maybe "codebases should only use extensions when it's feasible to provide fallbacks" or something.
> and Linux is wrong to do so.
I'm not sure I agree. There are some worthwhile extensions IMO, which is why I made the point earlier that I think it's time to standardize them.
Why? If you can improve the performance/security/stability of Linux by re-writing functionality without extensions, by all means do so(and send in a patch). Why is Linux "wrong" for this?