So apparently auto was voted in to the committee draft of C2X at the last minute. I wonder how this aligns with the WG14 charter, given the lack of implementation experience with this feature, but it looks like we are now stuck with it.
My main worry is that both Clang and GCC still enable implicit ints by default. This means that auto variables have type int always, and that can subtly alter the meaning of programs. The only indication that this has happened in a code base is a warning that went away (!). I don't like that. My original plan was to port upstreams & distributions away from implicit ints (again, configure scripts are problematic), and then have at least one GCC release that disables implicit ints in the default language mode. But I'm not sure if that's now possible: the porting will not have propagated widely once GCC 13 releases, so rejecting implicit ints in GCC 13 might be too early. GCC 14 might want to switch to C23/C24 mode by default, activating auto support, if the standard comes out in 2023 (which apparently is the plan). Then we would go from warning to changed semantics in a single release. Comments? Thanks, Florian
