Re: Why named structs and unions? C11 supports anonymous structs and unions

[Daniel Colascione <dancol@dancol.org>]

On 02/11/2018 11:28 PM, Paul Eggert wrote:
> Daniel Colascione wrote:
>> I feel like being stuck on C99 and not being able to use C11 would be
>> much rarer. Besides: C99 compilers usually supported anonymous structs 
>> and
>> unions as an extension.
> 
> One counterexample is the vendor-supplied compiler on the main server of 
> our department, which is running Solaris 5.10 (circa 2005). This 
> compiler is Sun C 5.9 (circa 2009). Although more recent versions of 
> this compiler do support anonymous structs and unions, bug reports are 
> still being filed about the feature, e.g., 
> https://community.oracle.com/thread/4106986 dated December 2017. So I 
> would say it's still a bit dicey in more-recent versions.

That's unfortunate.

> If it were really important to require this C11 feature I suppose we 
> could forge ahead and do it and tell laggards to upgrade their compilers 
> or use GCC. But my impression is that the feature is mostly just a 
> nicety, at least for Emacs.

If there would be real people adversely impacted by a C11 requirement, 
we can hold off a little while. The union stuff is merely ugly; it's not 
a severe problem. I'd definitely like to move to C11 and anonymous inner 
structures eventually though.