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Comment by _dh54 | Hacker News Reader

Not to mention written in C89. This person knows how to distribute code well. I love libraries like this, I wish we had more.

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How relevant is C89 really nowadays? As far as I understand it took MSVC a long time to catch up to C99, but it's been there for a long time now. Is the motivation more related to retrocomputing? I would expect that decades-old compilers for retro platforms might not be reliably C89 conforming either.

msvc's still not hit C99, but to be fair, they're not aiming for it

(last I checked a year or two ago)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C99#Implementations

Only 7 of the 24 compilers in the list fully implements C99 whereas I would guess all those compilers implement C89. If you want to write long-lived programs, C89 is a good choice.

Thanks, though those numbers may be a bit misleading. It's probably feasible to have very widely portable programs in C99-except-obscure-pragmas. But MSVC in particular seems to be less far along than I thought. Oh well.

Also, the difference between C89 and C99 is not that big.

It’s not just retro computing, new hardware platforms bootstrap themselves by providing a c89 compiler. It’s just good form. Imo c99’s additional features are not worth losing nearly universal portability. It’s trivial to reimplement most of c99’s useful features with a small header if you must, as this library does.

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