C89 compatibility about slice99 HOT 5 CLOSED

Oh, ne need to hurry. Thanks for the in-depth analysis (I didn't even anticipate you'd spend so much time with it).

Actually the changes you've listed will probably not be worth maintaining for the sole purpose of Nuklear. Despite that it really seems to be the only sensible way forward if we decided to give Slice99 a change 😉.

OTOH there is some brainstorming going on regarding major overhaul of Nuklear and we could even consider going with C99 in which case different things will get easier.

But this will of course not change the fact the linked PR will inevitably make it verbose to work with strings (assuming the most common scenario that we won't go the route of downstream patching of Slice99).

Closing as answered. Thanks a lot and keep up the great work!

from slice99.

Hello! Apologies for the late response. I've spent some time trying to compile Slice99 on ANSI C. I stumbled upon:

• Variadic macro functions like SLICE99_ARRAY_LEN, Slice99_from_array, and Slice99_typed_from_array should be removed or changed.
• restrict and inline keywords should be workarounded somehow.
• Fixed-width integers should be gated under a feature (ANSI C has no support for them).
• etc.

While all these things can be workarounded, the final library API would be different. But since you are asking specifically about Nuklear, I think the whole Slice99 is a kind of overkill here, isn't it? You can just copy-paste and change the necessary stuff from Slice99 to Nuklear and adapt it to make it work on ANSI C.

from slice99.

But since you are asking specifically about Nuklear, I think the whole Slice99 is a kind of overkill here, isn't it?

Sorry, I forgot to answer this question. Theoretically yes, it's a bit overkill. The rule of thumb suggests though that it's always better for serious projects to keep upstream things as they are (FYI we've made a similar mistake already with adjusting - even if only very slightly - the external header-only font library we use and it brought only headaches for several years).

from slice99.

OTOH there is some Immediate-Mode-UI/neonuklear#1 regarding major overhaul of Nuklear and we could even consider going with C99 in which case different things will get easier.

Upgrading to C99 might be a viable option. Today on HN I saw this post: https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/885941/01fdc39df2ecc25f/. TL;DR The Linux kernel developers are thinking about C99 in the 5.18 kernel.

Personally, I use C99 at work. All our platforms (which are IP cameras) have stable support for C99. I think that restricting a modern codebase to only C89 is really an anachronism, given that even the Linux kernel devs, who have always been conservative, are considering using C99 in the near future.

from slice99.

Interesting observation. Thanks for the pointer!

(I myself always use the newest C available - but without any GNU extensions etc. - -pedantic)

from slice99.