Re: Development Speed

[xenodasein]

Quoting: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2021-12/msg02139.html
From: Eli Zaretskii
Subject: Re: Development Speed
Date: Wed, 22 Dec 2021 14:41:18 +0200

> You are not listening. I asked you what would be the advantages, and
> you answer a very different question.

Ah, OK.  In my case I find it harder to work on older C bases, as
I don't have experience in legacy development.  I am very familiar with
ISO/IEC 9899:2018, but when I see ANSI C it is very stressing not
being certain whether I am looking at some UB, or legacy compiler bug.
Likely there are many other new generation developers like me who
stumble upon this while looking to contribute to huge free software
projects.



> In any case, we already probe the compiler for support of C11, and if
> it does, activate that while compiling. That's not the issue being
> discussed here. The issue being discussed is whether we should
> actively reject compilers that don't support older C standards.

Quoting: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2021-12/msg02123.html
From: Óscar Fuentes
Subject: Re: Development Speed
Date: Wed, 22 Dec 2021 11:09:09 +0100

> I sincerely don't get the stance of clinging to decades-old software and
> hardware but when it comes to Emacs it must be the latest and shiniest.
> As if Emacs version N would cease to work the very moment Emacs version
> N+1 is released.

Why is it not viable to update the code base and compiler as major
versions progress?  Couldn't we back-port much desired new features as
packages/modules?  It isn't like older Emacs versions are useless,
they are all extremely useful and unrivaled.