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Comment by imron | Hacker News Reader

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imron·

> But today, there is little reason for most projects not use the advances found in C99.

Does visual studio support c99 yet? Last I heard MS wasn’t interested in supporting it.

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It supports most of it. Useless stuff like VLA is still uninmplemented though.

Why is VLA useless?

Why was it added to C99?

Because even C isn't free from the occasional misfeature slipping into the standard. VLAs come with a lot of caveats (e.g. available stack size being limited and opaque, no sizeof() support, etc).

VLAs were made optional in C11, so it's better not to use them at all for portable code.

You can use clang on VS

Really? No longer an MS user but occasionally my code gets ported to Windows so would like to know more.

MSVC in C mode is essentially C89 plus extensions needed to compile C++/C99-isms present in Windows SDK and DDK headers. And Microsoft seems to be mostly interested in whether the compiler is able to build NT kernel and drivers and nothing much else.

That's not true for quite some time. Visual Studio 2013 added many C99 features that aren't in C++ like compound literals or designated initializers.

The only notable C99 features not supported on the MSVC C compiler are: (a) VLAs, and (b) type-generic macros. The distinction between the MSVC C and C++ compiler is important though. The MSVC C++ compiler doesn't support any C99 features.

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