[Python-Dev] which C language standard CPython must conform to (original) (raw)

Gregory P. Smith greg at krypto.org
Tue Feb 7 23:24:32 CET 2012

On Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 1:41 PM, "Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:

Am 07.02.2012 20:10, schrieb Gregory P. Smith:

Why do we still care about C89?  It is 2012 and we're talking about Python 3.  What compiler on what platform that anyone actually cares about does not support C99? As Amaury says: Visual Studio still doesn't support C99. The story is both funny and sad: In Visual Studio 2002, the release notes included a comment that they couldn't consider C99 (in 2002), because of lack of time, and the standard came so quickly. In 2003, they kept this notice. In VS 2005 (IIRC), they said that there is too little customer demand for C99 so that they didn't implement it; they recommended to use C++ or C#, anyway. Now C2011 has been published.

Thanks! I've probably asked this question before. Maybe I'll learn this time. ;)

Some quick searching shows that there is at least hope Microsoft is on board with C++11x (not so surprising, their crown jewels are written in C++). We should at some point demand a C++ compiler for CPython and pick of subset of C++ features to allow use of but that is likely reserved for the Python 4 timeframe (a topic for another thread and time entirely, it isn't feasible for today's codebase).

In that timeframe another alternative Question may make sense to ask: Do we need a single unified all-platform-from-one-codebase python interpreter?

If we can get other VM implementations up to date language feature wise and manage to sufficiently decouple standard library development from CPython itself that becomes possibile. One of the difficulties with that would obviously be new language feature development if it meant updating more than one VM at a time in order to ship an implementation of a new pep.

-gps

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list