Re: Development Speed

[xenodasein--- via "Emacs development discussions." <emacs-devel@gnu.org>]

Quoting: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2021-12/msg02433.html
From: Stefan Monnier

> I'd be surprised if the compliance (or not) of Emacs's C code with
> specific versions of the C standard would make any difference to
> a newcomer.

> If you describe a concrete problem linked to being "not C17 compliant",
> then maybe we can start thinking about a plan.

I had heard of studies showing how most bugs in important
C software were resulting from UBs, i.e. having wrong assumptions
on what you write; and it is exacerbated the less standard compliant
the code is.  Hell, didn't they invent Rust just to avoid these
issues?  Keeping current is something like switching to Rust in this
case.  This and some other things mentioned on the thread seem
concrete issues to me, even if it they are very small in Emacs'
hierarchy of problems, so no rush.

> But so far all I've seen > is "compliance for its own sake".

Even when it made zero technical improvements, it would make soft
improvements especially for future.

> ... - The cruft accumulated over the years. ...

Language would help with this, I think.

> I don't even know of any single place where we're not "C17 compliant".

I'm confused, does this mean it is possible to fully build Emacs
with "-std=c17"?

> The difficulty in our C code comes from various aspects, none of which
> have much to do with the C language itself: ...
> ...
> Over the years, we've managed to reduce the use of macros ...

I appreciate this detailed information, thanks for your time.
I better save it for possible future use in documentation.