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Date: Thu, 1 Jun 2023 08:58:42 +0200
From: Jₑₙₛ Gustedt <jens.gustedt@...ia.fr>
To: Rich Felker <dalias@...c.org>
Cc: musl@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: Re: High-level C23 process requests
Rich,
on Wed, 31 May 2023 17:39:23 -0400 you (Rich Felker <dalias@...c.org>)
wrote:
> On Wed, May 31, 2023 at 11:00:12PM +0200, Jₑₙₛ Gustedt wrote:
> > Hello Rich,
> > so now your are putting the blame on me, is that it?
>
> I'm trying my best not to, despite being really frustrated.
ok
so, the frustration seems to be mutual
> ...
> I think we're coming at this with very different goals. From what I
> can gather (apologies if this turns out to be inaccurate), to you musl
> looks like a place that's accessible to implement all the new things
> C23 offers or allows, in a fairly straightforward way, that makes it
> possible to test these things and get started with using new language
> features you took part in shaping.
That's at least not the whole story. I used musl to try things out,
yes, but I would never have engaged in such a project of doing the
whole C23 changes if I would not have thought that it would be
helpful.
> To myself and others in this community, though, there's mixed
> sentiment towards new things.
hm
> Already I've heard various comments to the effect that folks think
> C23 is this big bad thing designed by committee to impose new
> requirements nobody wants on implementations, calls to boycott it,
> etc.
That is surprising. WG14 put a lot (really *a lot*) of effort in
trying not to impose ABI changes and only to integrate things that
were already present in the field. You can see that from the patches I
proposed, most of it is really boring stuff that compilers, OSes or C
libraries already had as extensions. At some points standardization
implies naming changes or to do marginal things a bit differently than
they had been in the field before, I think this is part of the game.
AFAICS, there are only three mandatory new library features that were
more or less inventions
- `printf` and `scanf` new length prefixes
- <stdbit.h>
- <stdckdint.h>
Where the latter isn't even really a library feature but a language
feature interfaced with a header.
As I already said, the principal goal of the first was to go around
the `intmax_t` ABI freeze.
The second comes from very explicit users requests, and a lot of this
is already present in compilers as builtins. Users actually wanted to
have much more than there is in this header, now, but we weren't able
to finish them in time.
Also, in the compiler community there does not seem to be much of a
resistance to implement C23. clang and gcc are almost complete and
probably will have all of C23 the day it will be officially
published. They will then probably switch to C23 as a default one or
two versions later, once the C library support is stable.
> That is very much NOT my view, but it's one that comes up and that
> I'm stuck mediating. And new requirements often do make it more
> difficult to preserve properties existing users/community want and
> expect.
The new possibility of optionally supporting `[u]int128_t` is also an
explicit user request. You might not have encountered it within musl's
community, but it is real.
> ...
> I very much appreciate and respect your work on the standardization
> process and your support for and contributions to musl, but I'd be
> lying if I said this present engagement isn't really frustrating to
> me. As you've said, though, I think it's "almost finished", and I'll
> do my best to focus on technical matters (vs style etc.) of the parts
> that are appropriate and needed C23 support.
We do agree then at least on that part. So I am looking forward for
any such technical matters that you still might want to raise.
Thanks
Jₑₙₛ
--
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