Dear Ron,
Am Freitag, den 17.03.2017, 22:51 +0000 schrieb ron minnich:
On Fri, Mar 17, 2017 at 3:32 PM Paul Menzel wrote:
I think there is no objection to move to C11, if somebody rewrites the code using GNU11 extensions.
Paul, the discussion I read made it clear that there were lots of objections to moving away from GNU11 extensions, viz.
There are many GNU extensions which are simply necessary to write sane, readable and performant code (e.g. to implement non-double-evaluating MIN()/MAX() macros, to cleanly control linking into particular sections, to get performant code generated for IO accessor functions, etc.). The C standard by itself is simply insufficient to support all systems programming use cases, and if we forbade GNU extensions we'd have to rewrite significant parts of coreboot in pure assembly and add weird, hardly readable workarounds for many code patterns. "
Now, I don't actually agree with all this, but the decision was made to go with GNU11, not C11.
You quoted Julius’ reply [1]. Later he also replied [2].
Yes, just to be clear (this has split into so many different threads that I'm no longer sure what the latest decision is?), I only (prematurely) objected to forbidding GNU extensions. Otherwise, I'm totally in favor of switching to C11 and not aware of any difference between the versions that would cause a problem for us.
So I still believe, that the “move away from GNU11 discussion” didn’t come to a conclusion, as that wasn’t the topic of the thread. So no decision was made. At least not announced publicly.
Thanks,
Paul
[1] https://www.coreboot.org/pipermail/coreboot/2016-November/082576.html [2] https://www.coreboot.org/pipermail/coreboot/2016-December/082588.html