GNU11 and C11 (was: coreboot community meeting minutes for March 16th, 2017)

[Paul Menzel]

Dear Ron,

Am Freitag, den 17.03.2017, 20:48 +0000 schrieb ron minnich:
> On Fri, Mar 17, 2017 at 11:30 AM Nico Huber wrote:
> > The decision was to make explicit what was already needed for a long
> > time (already last time Clang was working). Don't worry about Clang, it
> > can digest -std=gnu11 as well [1].
>
> If that works for this project, then I guess that's ok. Harvey, on the
> other hand, also intends to use the intel compiler (ICC). -std=gnu11 is not
> an option we would ever use.

Currently, coreboot *does* use these GNU extensions. So the code would
not built, when disallowing the compiler to use them. I think there is
no objection to move to C11, if somebody rewrites the code using GNU11
extensions.

Thanks,

Paul

[ron minnich]

On Fri, Mar 17, 2017 at 3:32 PM Paul Menzel via coreboot <
[e-mail]> 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.

thanks

ron