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Comment by Quarrel | Hacker News Reader

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Quarrel·

It certainly seems to me that using this would eliminate 75% or so of the objections to it.

For this use case, at least, it feels like a CS version of racism. MSFT is bad, so no MSFT.

It largely clears up an idiosyncrasy from the evolution of C.

(but, as someone that briefly worked on plan9 in 1995/96, I like your idea :)

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Can you confirm whether or not anonymous member structures originated with the Plan 9 C compiler? I know I first learned of them from the Plan 9 compiler documentation, but that was long after they were already in GCC. I can't find when they were added to Microsoft's C compiler, but I'm guessing GCC's "-fms-extensions" flag is so named simply because it originated as a compatibility option for the MinGW project, and doesn't by itself imply they were a Microsoft invention. GCC gained -fms-extensions and anonymous member structures in 1999, and MinGW is first mentioned in GCC in 1997. (Which maybe suggests Microsoft C gained anonymous structure members between 1997 and 1999?)

Relatedly, do you know if anonymous member unions originate with C++, Plan 9 C, or elsewhere?

Archives of published MS SDKs show they were using the feature in NT 3.1's public headers in 1993, so it's at least that old.

https://archive.org/details/win32-sdk-final-release-nt-31

Do you have references to objections? I couldn't find any on the lkml threads.

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