Re: How can Autoconf help with the transition to stricter compilation defaults?

[Jonathan Wakely]

On Thu, 10 Nov 2022 at 17:58, Jonathan Wakely wrote:
>
> On Thu, 10 Nov 2022 at 17:52, Nick Bowler wrote:
> > It saddens me to see so much breakage happening in "modern C", a
> > language that has (until now) a long history of new language features
> > being carefully introduced to avoid these sort of problems.
>
> The features were introduced in 1999.

Well, some of them were. Some more are coming now in C2x but the
problem has existed since C99 it's just that compilers "protected"
most users from having to fix their code at the time. But it's been
more than two decades and it's time to accept that missing prototypes,
implicit conversions between pointers and ints etc are a hazard and
should be diagnosed not ignored for the benefit of people who never
want to fix their questionable code.

> Compilers just continued to
> accept broken code, because people seem to think accepting garbage
> forever is "compatibility".