ISO Updates C Standard

An anonymous reader writes "The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has published the new specifications for the C programming language. The standard is known unofficially as C1X and was published officially as ISO/IEC 9899:2011. It provides greater compatibility with the C++ language and adds new features to C (as indicated in the draft)."

Comments

First post!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, who cares about that?

Seriously, though, am I the only one who finds it strange that one has to buy copies of the standard?

Re:First post!!

[symbolset]

Actually though, most of us. Changes to the C standard are a big deal.

Re:First post!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Do they sell them by the C-shore?

Re:First post!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh? $300? For a PDF file? Heh.

Re:First post!!

[JustOK]

yes, if you have 300 clams.

Re:First post!!

[dutchd00d]

Not really, a lot of books cost money. Why would this one be different?

First of all, it's not a book. It's a PDF. Second of all, the Netherlands is a member body of ISO, so I have already paid for it through my taxes. I should be able to use the fruits of ISO without additional cost (or maybe some nominal fee). Third of all, an ISO standard has the status of a law: you'd better do it this way, or else. So they're telling me the law has changed, and then charging me 300 euros to find out precisely what the new law is. I believe that's called extortion.

Re:First post!!

[Noughmad]

The new standard have been on display for free at the Alpha Centauri planning office for the last fifty years.

Re:First post!!

[93 Escort Wagon]

Oh? $300? For a PDF file? Heh.

But these limited-edition PDFs are signed and numbered.

Re:First post!!

[TheRaven64]

The last draft and the errata are always free downloads. That's what I've been using to implement the atomics stuff in clang / FreeBSD.

Re:First post!!

[wzzzzrd]

It's 300 bucks, it was produced by a committee financed by tax payer's money, it's a pdf, not even a printed book. It's an open standard and will be needed by a lot of developers who want or must write standard compliant code. This is EXACTLY the thing RMS means when he is shouting his song.

Grab the original file from here.

Re:First post!!

[NekSnappa]

I think you meant c-shells.

Re:First post!!

[bunratty]

You're not paying for just the production or distribution of the file, book, movie, music, software, or drug when you pay for those things. You're paying for the effort required to make the item in the first place. If it takes someone one year to write a book, they need to recieve much more than the cost of distributing a PDF file to make a living from writing.

Re:First post!!

[Vanders]

Developers can't write standards compliant code without knowing what the standards are.

Oh what am I saying? Developers won't write standards compliant code even if they do know what the standards are!

Re:First post!!

[bonch]

This is EXACTLY the thing RMS means when he is shouting his song.

Of course, when he's not doing that, he's advocating necrophilia and "voluntary pedophilia". Maybe not the best spokesperson to get behind.

Re:Let's get C99 right first

[wdef]

C is withering and dying? Isn't it still used more than any other language: http://langpop.com/

Re:Let's get C99 right first

[Daniel Phillips]

Who cares about Microsoft these days? Any damage they cause by lagging behind standards is only to themselves, unlike the bad old days. In the modern world GCC is the bar by which Microsoft is measured, and usually found lacking.

move on

[OrangeTide]

Many of us gave up waiting on Microsoft for our development tools.

Re:Let's get C99 right first

[Feltope]

COBOL is king, always will be.

Solid and reliable code that works period!

Draft available for free

[FrangoAssado]

For those interested, the last draft before the official version is available for free here: http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n1570.pdf

Re:Let's get C99 right first

[hairyfeet]

Don't forget to use the magic uncripple settings if you do that Mr AC or you'll be tying a boat anchor to every non Intel chip that tries to run you code.

Re:So...

[Old Wolf]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C1X

Re:Let's get C99 right first

[JDG1980]

Microsoft wants C to die. No one else is cooperating with them on this. As a result, Windows developers are stuck with worse tools for C than developers on almost any other platform. (Yes, there's MinGW, but it's a real pain and does not support many newer Windows APIs at all.)

Re:Let's get C99 right first

[JDG1980]

Unfortunately, the damage goes beyond that. You can't effectively use GCC (MinGW) to build most Windows applications, not only because these applications are full of Visual C++isms, but also because many newer APIs (notably Direct2D and DirectWrite) are not currently supported under MinGW at all.

Re:Let's get C99 right first

[Anonymous Coward]

"This includes even the most basic stuff, like declaring variables in the middle of your code. It's actually a GCC extension to C"

No it's not— it's part of ISO C99.

Looks like story is already dated...

[ibsteve2u]

The standard is known unofficially as C1X

GCC already says:

A fourth version of the C standard, known as C11, was published in 2011 as ISO/IEC 9899:2011. GCC has limited incomplete support for parts of this standard, enabled with -std=c11 or -std=iso9899:2011. (While in development, drafts of this standard version were referred to as C1X.)

Syntax is everything in C.

Re:Let's get C99 right first

[kthreadd]

If your program relies on the presence of GCC extensions, you did it wrong in the first place.

Poul-Henning's take on this.

[Anonymous Coward]

https://www.varnish-cache.org/docs/trunk/phk/thetoolsweworkwith.html

Re:Poul-Henning's take on this.

[shutdown -p now]

His complaint about _Noreturn and similar keywords is silly. First, they were there 12 years ago already, in C99 - _Bool, _Complex etc. The reason for this scheme is that if they just made noreturn a keyword, existing valid C programs that use it as identifier would become illegal. On the other hand, underscore followed by capital letter was always reserved for implementations, so no conforming program can use it already. And then you can opt into more traditionally looking keywords, implemented via #define to the underscore versions, by explicitly including the appropriate header.

Re:Let's get C99 right first

[Freestyling]

Hi, I'm a Windows developer.

I'll take C# over C any day, and I have 20 years of C experience.

I believe that's kinda the parent poster's point. For a windows developer MS make their proprietary C# language easy, and C hard work. Now for most stuff that's fine, but sometimes a lower level language is needed. Ever tried writing a kernel mode driver in C#?

Re:Let's get C99 right first

[Anonymous Coward]

For a windows developer MS make their proprietary C# language easy, and C hard work. Now for most stuff that's fine, but sometimes a lower level language is needed.

Interesting, it's like you've never heard of C++ which MS does fully support [slowly] and is standard. I know pure C is a sacred cow but writing pure procedural code in C++ won't kill you, in fact, it will probably make the code much easier to read since you can't just arbitrarily cast back and forth between void pointers and other types without explicit type brackets.

Ever tried writing a kernel mode driver in C#?

MS has been experimenting with that but it seems more likely that they'll just hoist most drivers into user space services so you can use any language, .Net based or not. They've already hoisted some USB drivers and the bulk of WDDM video card drivers, just backwards compatibility in the way for the rest.

Re:Let's get C99 right first

[rev0lt]

The solidity and reliability of COBOL code comes from decades of correcting bugs and lack of features of most applications that are still in use today. And yes, I've worked professionally as a COBOL programmer.

Re:Let's get C99 right first

[Richard_at_work]

Not being a C or C++ developer, I'm not sure who to believe - in the Firefox compilation story a few days ago, there were a fair few highly modded up posts extoling the virtues of the quality and speed of binaries output by the MS C and C++ compiler over GCC.

Any thoughts on that?

Re:Let's get C99 right first

[rev0lt]

Actually, C# is as proprietary as C - it isn't. Check http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/aa569283 for the ISO standard details regarding C#.
Microsoft .NET implementation is proprietary, but there is an early open source release of the .NET CLI implementation codenamed "Rotor", for XP, FreeBSD and MacOS X. Additionally, the Mono project is an opensource clean-room implementation, but it may not be feature-complete.

Microsoft Research has an interesting project called Singularity - an operating system running (mostly) in managed code. Some initialization routines are done in Assembly/C/C++, but the kernel itself and respective drivers are written entirely in managed code. Check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_(operating_system).

Re:Let's get C99 right first

[TheRaven64]

GCC? People still use that? Clang can now parse a lot of the standard windows headers. 3.1 should have finished implementing the required quirks to understand the Windows templates. There's also work underway to support the Win64 exception model, which will hopefully be done by the 3.1 release.

Re:So...

[TheRaven64]

As with every other version of the C standard, you can read the draft yourself. A few things that are nice:

• A detailed and well-thought-out set of atomic operations. I've got a diff for clang that implements these that should be committed in the next few days after a bit of tidying. Ed Schouten has written the supporting header to FreeBSD libc, so these can be used now (with fall back to GCC intrinsics for a marginally slower implementation).
• Unicode string literals and a few functions for manipulating them.
• _Generic() letting you write type-generic macros.
• Anonymous structure and union members, so you can write things like struct { int tag; union { void *ptr; uintptr_t i}; } s; and then refer to s.ptr or s.i, rather than needing to provide a name for the union (this is already a GNU extension, but it's nice to have it in the standard).
• Static assertions, so you can do things like _Static_assert(sizeof(int) == 4, "This code path should not be used in ILP64 platforms!"); and get a compile-time error if it is.
• A _Thread_local storage qualifier for thread-local variables (equivalent to the __thread GNU extension).
• Alignment checks and specifiers.
• A few things from POSIX, like the x specifier in fopen() for exclusive open.

Some of the not-so-nice features include threads.h, which is equivalent to pthreads but with a different function names (and ones that seem quite likely to cause conflicts with existing code).

Re:Let's get C99 right first

[shutdown -p now]

Simply put, gcc beats VC on standard compliance, and VC beats gcc on optimization quality.

Anyway, VC is primarily a C++ compiler. C support is largely legacy, and hasn't been updated for a long time now.

Re:Can't we please let C die?

[jcr]

You have that exactly backwards. It's C+++ that should die.

-jcr

WTF is "ISO C"?

[Anonymous Coward]

I spent my early years programming K&R C on Unix systems.

When the ANSI standards were ratified, ANSI took over.

But WTF is "ISO C"? With a core language whose goal is portability and efficiency, why would I want the language trying to can platform-specific implementations like threading? C is not a general purpose language -- it's power comes from tying to the kernels and platform libraries of the industry at the lowest levels possible to maximize performance.

If you don't need that maximum performance, you use C++ or another high-level language.

ANSI C is the assembler of the modern computing age, not a general purpose programming language.

Now get off my lawn!

Most critical software is written in COBOL

[perpenso]

Real mission critical stuff at Boeing? NASA? All that stuff then right?

Actually their most critical software is probably written in COBOL, their payroll software. Without that COBOL based software nothing gets done. :-)

Re:My "Ask Slashdot"

[bonch]

Objective-C, of course.