Re: [bug-gettext] [PROPOSED] Use VLAs in C11 compilers that advertise them

[Bruno Haible]

Hi Paul,

> > Why? Around 1992-1997 I learned the lesson that one cannot really rely
> > on the values of __STDC_VERSION__ and the like. Too many compilers lie
> > about it.
> 
> Although that's certainly true in general

OK, thanks for the confirmation.

> It has been used that 
> way for something similar in Gnulib's lib/vla.h, without reported 
> problems.

Well, lib/vla.h is more about function declarations, rather than
about VLAs inside functions.

What would be useful is to have the test results of m4/vararrays.m4
with various compilers. More precisely, with the _minimum_ version of the
Solaris C compiler that advertises __STDC_VERSION__ == 201112L
(because usually they don't regress on language features, but they often
advertise a full standard as being supported although some language
features are not yet implemented). And likewise for HP-UX C, MSVC, Intel C,
and so on.

But I don't want to spent 3 hours on this. The benefit is too small.

Bruno