Why is C90 enforced in KDE?

[Thomas Lübking]

On Sonntag, 20. Dezember 2015 04:21:29 CEST, Kevin Kofler wrote:

> The kdewin team should just point people to a flex.exe that produces files 
> that work with the bitrotten C compiler included with Visual C++.

So we only need somebody who forks the hardly maintained flex/yacc tools for windows...

It should be simpler to point windows users to a recent MSVC (2015), gcc, clang, or icc (ie. mandate them for KF5, raising the bar from Qt5)

We could then indeed raise to -c99 and "guarantee" compilation only for compatible compilers (while older MSVC *may* still work)

I'd say it's up to the kdewin people to state their preferences here
- require bison and switch to c++ in the flex/yacc toolchain
- (soft)require a c99 compliant compiler (where MSVC 2013 *may* still work)

> Another, more practical, reason is that if a bug (maybe a security issue)
> affecting the generated output is fixed in Flex, the pre-generated files
> would not pick up the fix.

Actually, that rather supports shipping pre-generated code (given the apparent support situation of flex/yacc on windows - windows users could encounter flex bugs none of us ever sees and the backtraces make no sense...)

Cheers,
Thomas