Re: Require C11 in PHP 8.4

On Thu, 1 Aug 2024 at 23:57, Ilija Tovilo <tovilo.ilija@gmail.com> wrote: > [...] > I started fixing these in a PR [1] which required more changes than > expected. After a short discourse, we were wondering whether it might > be better to switch to a newer C standard instead. Our coding > standards [2] currently specify that compiling php-src requires C99. > The Unix installation page on php.net [3] claims it is ANSI C, which > is certainly outdated. There have been suggestions to require C11 for > a while, which should be well supported by all compilers shipped with > maintained distributions. > It feels wrong to raise such an important requirement that might affect a lot of people, including maintainers of extensions, for just one specific problem, and 99% of the codebase would still be C99 compliant. I quickly put together an alternative PR (#15202) with a slightly different approach, just as a proof of concept. The idea is to move all the global typedefs in a new include header "zend_types_defs.h" (but also zend_portability.h can be reused for this purpose, as all the relevant files already include it). While putting together that PR, I had the feeling that this typedef redefinition problem is in reality hiding some smelly design of header files. So maybe, rather than requiring a compiler more tolerant to poor code, we should rather focus on getting the design right.