[GRASS-dev] Min. req. of programming language standard support, GRASS GIS 8

[Maris Nartiss]

Our C code base de facto is not C90. I just run clean compilation with
-Wall -Wextra -pedantic -std=C90 -g -O2 and it generated 405
non-unique ISO C warnings. In comparison C99 and C17 gives 1274
warnings. Compiling with gnu90 and gnu17 gives more warnings.
I guess some of gnu90 warnings will go away when PRs dealing with
compiler warnings will be merged, but many are to stay (long long,
%lf, __func__, variable length arrays). Most of warnings are just
harmless (C++ comments in C code), although some of them are not
(sensu strict C90 conformance e.g. assignment between function pointer
and ‘void *’).

Thus question is – C99 or C17 (as I understood, C11 is not worth as
C17 just relaxes some C11 requirements).
As I am not that strong in C standards, no recommendation from my
side, but can anyone name a platform that is expected to run G8 and
does not have C11/C17 compiler?

In my opinion for G8 we should drop GDAL < 3, PROJ < 6 and C < 11.
Yes, that would reduce our bragging potential as GRASS will not run on
PDP any more, but lets be realistic here on our expectations.

At the end as this seems to be a bit more of political than technical
issue, I would suggest the new PSC to come up with clarification on
our position regarding G8.

Māris.