Re: [XBoard-devel] C89/C99/ANSI compliance - cleanups needed?

[Tim Mann]

That sounds like an OK idea to me. xboard has a long history and at one time needed to be able to build with K&R and/or other older compilers. I doubt there is any need for that anymore. I don't have a strong opinion on exactly which version of the ANSI C standard would be best to target.

One thing to be careful of is that the code shared with WinBoard needs to build with whatever Windows compiler(s) we care about. At one time that was some old version of MSVC that I owned a copy of, then that plus gcc. HG will hopefully weigh in on what compiler he uses.

On Thu, Mar 19, 2015 at 1:56 PM, Thomas Adam <address@hidden> wrote:

Hello,

I was looking at the XBoard code as I've a few patches I intend to send
out, in the form of bugfixes and a few little features, etc., and in
doing so have noticed a few things which have irritated me enough to ask
some questions, as I'll likely do these first before anything else.  :)

The INSTALL file alludes to some compilers (c89) being used---which if
that were the case would likely fail.  Try this, for instance:

    CFLAGS="-std=c89" ./configure && make

The result is one of failure for all sorts of reasons.  Likewise, for
c99:

    CFLAGS="-std=c99" ./configure && make

There are more failures.  I appreciate I've not been very specific as to
which, but I'm curious which one you'd at least want to try and adhere
to.

More generally, there's a lot of older, err, "cruft" if I can call it
that with a mixture of K&R/ANSI function protoypes, the use of the very
old P() macro, etc., which makes me wonder any form of C standards
compliance has largely been overshadowed.

I'm very happy to audit the files in question and clean a lot of these
things up (even as proof-of-concepts so you can see what the impact
is), but I'd appreciate thoughts on this before I start wading through,
as it's very easy to overshoot yourself and go beyond what's wanted.

My own preference would be for ANSI across the board (no pun intended),
and adherence to c89 so that we can then check to see if things can be
modernised further, assuming we don't break older compilers.

Thoughts?

-- Thomas Adam

--
"Deep in my heart I wish I was wrong.  But deep in my heart I know I am
not." -- Morrissey ("Girl Least Likely To" -- off of Viva Hate.)