Perhaps naively, I‘d assume that while there may well be someone out there relying on compilers for which this would be a problem, that same person is also less likely to be able to upgrade PETSc.
The benefits seem well worth it. It‘ll make things just that much easier to work with. +1 for the for-loop declarations. No more need to police the use of // C++-style comments? Jed Brown <j...@jedbrown.org> schrieb am Sa. 7. März 2020 um 06:48: > I have a question for petsc-dev: Do you know anyone who needs to build > PETSc with a compiler that doesn't support variadic macros and for-loop > declarations? (Both of these are in C99 and C++11, and supported by all > tested configurations including compilers that don't fully implement > these standards.) Both MPICH and Open MPI use variable-length arrays > and for-loop declarations, so you'd be hard-pressed building a modern > stack with such a compiler. I'm not proposing that we put these macros > unguarded into the public headers, so a user of PETSc could still build > with -std=c89 and the like. > > > ## Background > > There is a common pattern in PETSc where we write > > PetscInt some,several,variables; > > // code > #if defined(PETSC_HAVE_MAGIC) > function(several,&variables); > #endif > use(some,variables); > > > Of course this gives unused variable warnings, so we tear our code apart > like > > PetscInt some,variables; > #if defined(PETSC_HAVE_MAGIC) > PetscInt several; > #endif > > // code > #if defined(PETSC_HAVE_MAGIC) > function(several,&variables); > #endif > use(some,variables); > > > but the bigger problem is that we need different configurations just to > check syntax of our compiled out blocks. I propose allowing variadic > macros (a C99 and C++11 feature) to allow code like > > PetscInt some,several,variables; > > // code > if (PetscDefined(HAVE_MAGIC)) { > function(several,&variables); > } > use(some,variables); > > > This approach could also be used to avoid needing separate macros for > every SETERRQ1-SETERRQ9, etc. I have an example implementation in this > MR, and it passes the full pipeline (after relaxing the -std=c89 > -pedantic build). > > https://gitlab.com/petsc/petsc/-/merge_requests/157/diffs > > > We could also consider allowing for-loop declarations, which I believe > leads to tighter and more understandable code because the reader doesn't > have to wonder whether the variable is used after the loop. > > for (PetscInt i=0; i<n; i++) { ... } > > > Note that we cannot use variable-length arrays (VLA) because they are > not in the intersection of C and C++. >