alt Hacker NewsSure, but the point is that code written against such a compiler is not C and is not portable. It is written in a dialect of C, and that comes with drawbacks.
Writing C (or any language) means adhering to the standard, because that's the definition of the language.
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rocketrascal • yesterday at 11:52 AM
You can't make any useful software in "Portable C" - or any portable language for that matter.
Side effects matter, and they are always non-portable/implementation defined/dependent on the hardware.
What printf() actaully does is implementation defined - what does "printing mean", does a console even exist? Maybe a user expects it to show graphical ascii/utf8 glyphs on a LCD display? Well, not every computer has that, so now what?
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Maybe it’s a generation thing. Languages like ML and Lisp have many implementations, while newer languages like Perl and Python are steered by a single organization. It’s way easier for the latter to have a single source of truth.
The C standard reminds me of Posix. You have a rough guideline if you ever wanted to port a program, but you actually have to learn the new compiler and its actual behavior before doing so.