net-snmp is expected to build on Windows, which gpsd does not; it's not clear how much this impacts compiler choice.
-----Original Message----- From: Eric S. Raymond [mailto:e...@thyrsus.com] Sent: Thursday, March 22, 2018 10:32 AM To: Bill Fenner <fen...@gmail.com> Cc: Net-SNMP Coders <net-snmp-coders@lists.sourceforge.net> Subject: C99 (was: Re: Fix patch for SF bug 2833) Bill Fenner <fen...@gmail.com>: > On Thu, Mar 22, 2018 at 9:16 AM, Eric S. Raymond <e...@thyrsus.com> wrote: > > > On the other hand, I question whether the extra overhead is a real > > issue in 2018. > > > I have the same question, but know that I have no useful opinion here > - my "embedded system" ships with 4 gigs minimum, but the project has > more use cases than mine. Bart's objection about changing the public ABI is a showstopper and I wihdraw the suggestion. On the other hand... >For example, the project did decide to back off from introducing c99 constructs. *This* is an issue about which I know something important that does not seem to have percolated into general knowledge yet. I lead the GPSD project, a daemon for handling GPSes and other geolocation sources. It's deployed *everywhere* - smartphones, driverless cars, marine navigation systems, main battle tanks, drones and UAVs, first-responder comm gear, you name it. If GPSD makes an assumption that breaks any Unix build chain or portability anywhere, I get a complaint right quick. I've fielded dozens of these. Maybe the weirdest one was due to actual signed chars on a 360 mainframe. There came a point at which I got tired of seeing legacy ifdefs from ancient big iron in my codebase. Thought about my options, decided to move to assuming C99 and SuSv2. I shipped a point release on this premise expecting at least some minor pushback from some odd legacy environment. I heard not a peep, and never have since. And this was in 2009. If that's not enough, since 2015 I have led the NTPsec project. Based on GPSD experience we made the same decision to assume a C99/SuSv2 base. With no problems whatsoever except that on old versions of MacOS one of the time primitives is broken. That's how I learned that the standards people won. Our traditional twitchiness about tossing out any portability shim back to the year zero is obsolete. And bear in mind that GPSD/NTPsec probably exercises a wider swathe of the host API than snmpd does, so the test has been more stringent. GPSD has to get deep into odd corners of the tty driver and kernel PPS; NTPsec gets even further into system clock handling. I can say with confidence that assuming C99 is *very* safe in 2018. -- <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a> My work is funded by the Internet Civil Engineering Institute: https://icei.org Please visit their site and donate: the civilization you save might be your own. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Net-snmp-coders mailing list Net-snmp-coders@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/net-snmp-coders ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Net-snmp-coders mailing list Net-snmp-coders@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/net-snmp-coders
