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Comment by blackhole | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile, I still don't have variadic templates in VC++ 2012.

To add to that -- Visual Studio still has woeful support for C99. I keep hoping that when (if?) they get full C++11 support, the C11 support will just fall out of that. Pipe dream, I know...

The only C features to be added to VS, unless something changes in the management, are features that map directly to C++.

http://herbsutter.com/2012/05/03/reader-qa-what-about-vc-and...

I'm aware of that, which is why I was hoping C11 would just fall out of the C++11 implementation. The people working on the C++11/C11 standards did so specifically to bring the languages closer together.

If you fully implement C++11, then C11 comes along for relatively little cost.

I keep hoping that Microsoft will wake up and realise that just as HTML5 was important, so is language support for the lingua-franca of the computing world.

One issue might be manpower ... My impression has been that MS's compiler team is woefully understaffed / overworked given the relatively influential position of their products.

Yeah, that's been my impression as well. They have a few people keeping the lights on, but that's it when it comes to C/C++.

For a company that wants to charge $13K+ for the "Ultimate" edition of their product, I'm not impressed with the current support.

Not disputing understaffed possibly being true, and not arguing with you guys, but it's a poor excuse for Microsoft being one of the richest, most powerful companies in the world, while willing and continuing to lose billions on things like Bing, Xbox (it's true, they still haven't broken even if you count all they spent plus the red-ring-of-death write-offs), Zune, and now their mobile initiatives.

And what was Microsoft doing in those 12 years between C99 and C11? What are they doing so inefficiently in their design that they can't figure out how to implement C when every other C++ compiler team has? Come on, Clang didn't even exist until 6 years ago.

Stupid positions Microsoft takes like this with regards to C99 and C11 only underscore how pathetic, short sighted, and clueless they have been for over a decade. They have needlessly alienated developers they profess they need so much for so little reason. How ironic that now they are begging developers to do Windows RT and are promoting "going native".

How ironic that now they are ... promoting "going native"

Actually for me this is a sign that they are finally starting to Get It. I agree with your sentiments on the last decade but it seems to be improving now.

C++11 (and C++03) do not include lots of C99 features. For example, C++03/11 do not contain variable length arrays (one of the C99 features people often want).

I'm aware of that, but if I had to give up VLA to get the rest of C11, I'd do so in a heartbeat.

I hear your pain. I'm trying to roll my pet project with C only (it suits me better, since I'm not a full time programmer). I'm using clang on OSX and gcc on linux and mingw on Windows (all x64, of course). There is something that bothers me though. I feel like I have made a grave mistake. Everything I look up that I need for my project there exists a suitable library for C++, but not for C. This surprised me. Maybe I don't know my way around libraries for C, but it seems like I have to reinvent wheel (badly so) if I want to stay with C. So now I'm thinking if I should just let go of C and do C with classes, which bothers me tremendously.

Heh, I'm familiar with that problem. I write in both C and C++ regularly, and be assured, the one I'm not using always seems better (maybe Google is just trolling me by showing me the results for the wrong language). I can only find C libraries or tools when I search for C++ libraries, and vice versa.

If you're doing low level work (e.g. the layout of your objects is a concern to you), stick with C. C++ often gets in the way there and you won't be able to write idiomatic C++. If it's midlevel you're better off with C++. If it's high level, neither of these are a good fit, and you're better off looking elsewhere.

It would be nice if we had a central repository for C libraries, like old CPAN. I know they can't be universal, but repo could be. Github is sometimes nice to browse aroynd, but not really that great with discovering/searching stuff.

Somebody made a CCAN that I found a while ago, though it is nowhere near CPAN yet. Thoughts? http://ccodearchive.net/

Nice, but it still needs to grow in number of libraries!

That's because the primary focus of Visual Studio is C++: http://www.infoq.com/news/2012/05/vs_c99_support/

Have you tried the November 2012 CTP [1]? It purports to add support for variadic templates, among other things.

[1] http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=3551...

tried it, hit compile and had dozen of corrupted object files. not to mention intellisense doesn't work.

The November CTP is a one-time experimental release. Subsequent formal VC++ updates don't include what it has. So for all practical purposes it might as well not exist.

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