[neomutt-devel] About C flavour (Was: Refactoring's cosmetics 💄)

[Guyzmo]

On Thu, Jan 26, 2017 at 09:26:33AM +0000, Stuart Henderson wrote:
> On 2017/01/25 23:12, Guyzmo wrote:
> > it's not as lovely as C99 style, but it's still worth not leaving out.
> GCC 4.9 is GPLv3-licensed which some operating systems can't include
> with the OS, it's usually possible to run but means an extra install (or
> lengthy build if binaries aren't available).
> Clang doesn't have particularly wide support for CPU architectures
> (x86 and ARM are pretty good, powerpc is missing some bits, others are
> not present or missing a lot).
> Are the extra things in C11 nice enough to be worth cutting out some
> users?

And what would be the realistic alternatives for GCC and Clang for
systems that are neither GPL-compatible and on an exotic architecture?

And what system+archicture would be running those users that would be
left over?

I wouldn't want to cut the possibility to use the freshest standard
(which is already over 5 years old) that encourages to make better code,
and offer features that we might or might not use, because of some
hypothetical user base which are using system configurations we won't be
able to test!

The same way I see no use in caring about having neomutt compile on AIX4,
having to install GCC to install neomutt on netbsd running on a MIPS
based toaster (yeah, such a toaster would be burning the toasts using
the CPU's heat), wouldn't be, IMHO, a huge problem.

And maybe, that would justify making a clear difference between what
mutt is and what neomutt is. Mutt would then be the boring good old MUA
that runs everywhere, and Neomutt would be more complex to run on
anything, but integrate more features (and hopefully one day be more
stable).

Cheers,

-- 
Guyzmo