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Comment by haberman | Hacker News Reader

C is effectively frozen in time, thanks largely to Microsoft's decision to deprioritize C support in favor of C++.

C99 is almost 20 years old and MSVC still doesn't fully support it. Forget about C11. If you're a C programmer who cares about portability, you stick with C89.

There's not a lot of point to having a conference about something that is stuck on a 30 year old standard.

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I think this is a very debatable claim. MSVC is an insignificant compiler in a lot of industries. In something like scientific computing, everything is written with gcc, clang and Intel on mind. Sure, you'll find some companies still using MSVC, but it's not industry standard any more and it's very unclear how an insignificant, outdated compiler can stop the progress of world's most fundamental programming language.

C's strength is being the lingua franca of the bottom of the stack. I can believe that there are some applications that know a priori that they will never need to be portable to MSVC. But for any foundational open-source library, closing the door to MSVC is a high price to pay. Someone, sooner or later, will want to use the code on Windows. If you are zlib, ffmpeg, freetype, Lua, LuaJIT, sqlite, libpng, c-ares, OpenSSL, PostgreSQL, glib, gtk, or anything that aspires to be as widely used as these, you stay C89-compatible to support MSVC.

"Use the code on windows" and "support msvc" are orthogonal properties. Gcc and clang both compile windows binaries.

These days you can just use clang on Windows. Latest standard supporting frontend + MSVC ABI compatibility.

MSVC is becoming less and less relevant. People are writing C99 and C11 and MSVC's insistence on breaking portability with modern codebases is incrementally marginalizing it as people switch to compilers that understand their standard compliant code.

Another one that doesn't code on Windows.

It is called MSVC++ for a reason.

Do people still care about MSVC outside whatever is left of the traditionalist Microsoft ecosystem?

But don't people, who compile C on Windows, usually compile it as C++? That means you in fact get access to some (most?) of C99.

Noone cares about Microsoft except a dozen guys caught in the reservation^Wecosystem there who still haven't moved to .NET.

Why would you want to write windows applications in C to begin with?

Heck, if you have a C app and want to port it to windows, you are probably better of just using WSL.

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