We, freeciv developers, should be aware of newish C11 standard. Not that we could start using C11 features in a long time - we depend on only some C99 features currently so that freeciv can be compiled with compilers that do not implement C99 fully.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C11_%28C_standard_revision%29 Features like _Generic -keyword would make life easier if we could use them exclusively, but as long as we need to support older compilers, there would be no gain in just adding new code as alternative to old one, and not replacing old code with new one. Some features that I do find interesting in relation to freeciv development at the moment: - Static assertions - that's something Jacob wanted to implement even with old compilers, but I think we should use C11 syntax and just make it optional - Multithreading support - we do need basic threading, so for pre-C11 envs we have to retain current pthread/winthread implementations as alternative, but C11 threading should be used when possible. We also use some non-mandatory (currently means: only optional threaded AI needs them) threading features that could be made available in C11 systems only - Improved Unicode support - I haven't investigated what this means in practice, but sounds like alternative to pulling libicu dependency in as discussed earlier. Even libicu couldn't be hard requirement, so implementing things optionally for C11 systems only is no worse in that respect - Variable length arrays are *optional* feature in C11 while they were mandatory in C99, and we do depend on that. It's unlikely that any system that we would otherwise support won't have variable length arrays support, but we have at least theoretical problem here. - ML _______________________________________________ Freeciv-dev mailing list Freeciv-dev@gna.org https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/freeciv-dev
