Re: Require C11 in PHP 8.4

On Friday, 2 August 2024 at 14:33, Giovanni Giacobbi <giovanni@giacobbi.net> wrote: > 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 is certainly outdated.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. I would like to see actual factual data rather than "vibes" as to how this would cause issues with third-party extensions. php-src is not C99 pedeantic compliant and we do use GCC extenstions. I do agree that maybe we should go back to fixing headers, but considering the drama this caused 18 months ago I do not know who here has the motivation to do this. Ideally I feel we should target C17 as it is a "bug fix" release of C11, but this might be impossible due to old compilers still being the default on LTS Distributions. The main benefit of C11/17 in the long run are atomics, that we kinda use already anyway. Moreover, as someone that has written an extension that has some usage, when I go back to it, I'd rather like to be able to use features from C23 than be stuck on C99, but that is just me. Best regards, Gina P. Banyard >