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Comment by CedarMadness | Hacker News Reader

The big problem with C99 was that MS refused to implement it. If C11 is going to take off, it will depend on MS updating their C compiler. Previously they have said that they don't support C development on Windows except on the device driver level, and would prefer everyone use C++ or one of the .NET languages, so I'm not hopeful about C11's chances.

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Why? No serious C development happens with MSVC today, and yet C is still one of the most widely used programming languages. The world has long since moved on, and C11 will be adopted by gcc, clang, icc, ibm's compilers, pelles and others.

As a professional C programmer, I really couldn't care less whether or not Microsoft decides to implement C11 or remain in the dark ages. That ship sailed years ago.

Clang has implemented a good chunk of C11, I would say you can use C11 on OS X, iOS, Linux etc ...

You can even use Clang on Windows if you need (MinGW, Cygwin or compiled with Visual Studio). I'm not sure if you can integrate Clang in VS for example, or if it is possible to access the OS C libraries from Clang.

I'm not seeing this as much of a problem. Windows is a dying platform because of a multitude of bad decisions like these. If they choose not to implement it, less software will be made for Windows, accelerating its demise.

People will continue writing software for windows for as long as it remains the dominant platform. What happens is that they'll use other languages such as C# (which is perfectly fine for them)

Of course people will continue to write software for the platform. I never said otherwise.

But there is a ton of software being written right now that doesn't target Windows, with no plans to target Windows. The only way Windows users will ever be able to use that software is if Microsoft makes it easy enough to port.

The nail in the coffin will be when most of the games on Steam do not work in Windows. With most business software becoming web-based, the only holdouts left will be old businesses locked into their enterprise crapware.

A few adventurous folks wrote a c99-to-c89 compiler, to solve the issues with MSVC.

https://github.com/rbultje/c99-to-c89

(see http://blogs.gnome.org/rbultje/2012/09/27/microsoft-visual-s...)

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