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mcpcpc

definitely a good idea. will add that to the “todo” list

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To the contrary, I wouldn't.

Using C99 + POSIX is the defining fact about your project.

I would let somebody else write a C89 irc client, instead.

Agreed, also "retro system compiler" doesn't mean it only supports old C standards, e.g. SDCC is C99 and C11 compatible. IMHO strict C89 is a much less enjoyable language to read and write than C99, for instance designated initialization and compound literals are massive improvements.

Also MSVC's C99 support is pretty good since ca. VS2015.

I was similarly thinking vbcc.

cc65 ( https://github.com/cc65/cc65 ) doesn't do C99 "and never will" according to https://cc65.github.io/doc/cc65.html but it's probably the most developed C compiler for 6502-based systems.

That's a shame.

When I mentioned retro systems, I had in mind obsolete compilers in stock installations of IRIX, AIX, Solaris, BeOS, NextStep, Amiga Unix etc. Not modern compilers that target 8-bit microcontrollers like SDCC.

To the extent required by ISO C++ compliance, although they just announced at CppCon that C11 and C17 are getting full support.

Naturally like everyone else in the C world, with exception of gcc/clang, all C99 features that became optional in C11 aren't planned to be supported.

The MSVC C compiler supported the full C99 designated initialization and compound literal features in VS2015, both are not part of the common C/C++ subset, but exclusive C99 features. So all in all the C99 support in MSVC hasn't been that bad since ca 2015, it just wasn't complete enough to be called "standard C99".

But yeah, those C99 features weren't consistent at all with Herb Sutter's 2012 blog post about MSVC only supporting C features that are needed for the C++ compiler.

C and C++ are more strictly separated in the Microsoft compilers compared to gcc and clang (which both support more modern C features in C++ mode via non-standard extensions), I think that's what's confusing many people. It's not a problem in mixed-language projects though, just put all the C code into .c files and all C++ code into .cpp and you're set, compiling C code with a C++ compiler isn't such a great idea anyway, since it limits you to a ca. 1995 version of C.

Why not write it in betterC?

https://dlang.org/spec/betterc.html

Because despite the name this "betterC" is not a C dialect, but a D dialect which is an entirely different language than C99?

Could just as well ask why not write it in Nim, Zig, Rust, Swift, Kotlin etc... This means a different audience, different target platforms, different trade-offs.

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