Re: Patch to allow compilation with old compilers (VS 2008)

[Paul Eggert]

On 9/18/18 8:28 AM, Akim Demaille wrote:
> Are you serious: VS2008, which was released almost ten years
> after C99, does not support this basic feature of C99?  There’s
> no way to ask for C99 support?


The simplest and best way for MS-Windows developers to address this 
problem is to use GCC, e.g., with MinGW or Cygwin. If this can't be done 
(most likely for political reasons, often masquerading as technical), 
developers can upgrade to VS2013 or later; see 
<https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2013/06/28/c1114-stl-features-fixes-and-breaking-changes-in-vs-2013/>. 
If even *that* can't be done (my goodness, they must be in a political 
minefield!), they can build Bison on a decent platform and run the 
generated code on VS2008.

We should not revisit the decision to assume basic C99 features in a 
developer tool like Bison. It's been almost 20 years since C99 was made 
a standard and at this point VS2008 is approaching museum-piece status 
even among MS-Windows developers. Since GNU policy is to not waste 
significant time supporting non-free platforms, this decision is an easy 
call.