On Jan 18, 2010, at 8:03 AM, Joerg Mayer wrote:
> with Wireshark being more than 10 years old and e.g. requiring glib2/gtk2,
> maybe it would be OK to move the coding requirements from C89 to C99.
> This would give us // comments, inline keywords and the like.
>
> What do you think?
I think the main compiler that has problems with // comments is the IBM C compiler for AIX, and, at least in newer versions, I think there might be a compiler flag to enable them; we'd have to have the configure script and the CMake stuff enable that flag when compiling with not-GCC on AIX. I don't know whether any other compilers reject them by default.
I don't know which other features of C99 aren't handled by, for example, MSVC++; we should check that.
Some C99 functions are implemented in header files or the C library; there might be systems that don't implement those features.
Whatever useful C99 features we *can* adopt, we probably should.