Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryao | Hacker News Reader

Do they still refuse to update their compiler to support any version of C beyond C89?

Unless they have changed course, it seems more likely that Microsoft will drop NT for a UNIX kernel than Microsoft would put this into their compiler. I assume that this is by Microsoft Research and work by Microsoft Research is almost never used by Microsoft. The only exception I know is Drawbridge, which they reportedly used in Azure.

View on HN

MSVC supports a substantial amount of C99, C11, and C17, but they don't support the features that were made optional in C11 (i.e., variable-length arrays).

By a substantial amount, do you mean the parts that overlap with C++? I recall reading something about Microsoft only caring about C++ support, such that anything in C that is not in C++ is unlikely to ever be implemented in their compiler, despite other compilers having no issue doing this.

There's a few things in C that are not in C++ that MSVC added. Designated initializers and type-generic macros are two features that come to mind, and I believe MSVC also supports C99 restrict. The only non-optional C11 feature I can think of that MSVC doesn't support these days is _Atomic.

That is an amazing change of heart on Microsoft's part.

> MSVC supports a substantial amount of C99, C11, and C17, (...)

Supporting only some features of a spec means that they do not conform with the spec.

Msvc is still stuck with C89, and it won't budge.

Funny, Microsoft seems to disagree with you: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/c11-and-c17-standard-...

> For many years Visual Studio has only supported C to the extent of it being required for C++. Things are about to change now that a conformant token-based preprocessor has been added to the compiler. With the advent of two new compiler switches, /std:c11 and /std:c17, we are officially supporting the latest ISO C language standards.

> All the required features of C11 and C17 are supported.

The spec has made those features optional, compliance doesn't require optional features, that is why they are optional.

SQL Server on Linux runs on Drawbridge, with NTUM and all.

No, since Visual Studio 2015 Microsoft have been making efforts to support C11 and C17.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com