[openssl-dev] [openssl.org #4479] ROLLUP PATCH: OS X 10.8 (x86_64): Compile errors when using "no-asm -ansi"

Jeremy Farrell jeremy.farrell at oracle.com
Fri Mar 25 20:07:54 UTC 2016


On 25/03/2016 17:55, Jeffrey Walton wrote:
>> Just out of interest, what requirement is there to be able to build with
>> compilers which support only a 27 year old version of C which was superseded
>> 17 years ago? I can't imagine much need to build now with compilers which
>> don't support at least the most popular features of C99 like inline.
> I can't really answer what's the reason for ANSI C or std=c90. The
> project sets its goals, so I'll have to leave that up to folks like
> Dr. Henson, Andy, Richard, Matt and Viktor.

I'd misunderstood what you were doing here; I thought this was just 
something you were playing with yourself rather than an officially 
supported configuration option which you were checking. Thanks for the 
great work you're doing checking all the options and combinations by the 
way, it's flushing out a lot of things that will save me some effort 
later ...

> ...
>
> In another project I work with, we're happy to support the old stuff
> like C++03. We don't want to dictate policy, and we want the user to
> have choices. If you want to build on a 10 or 15 year old system and
> it makes you happy, then hat's off to you.
>
> Jeff

I agree that OpenSSL should support older compilers and environments, 
but it's a question of how far back it's worth going and how much effort 
and code complexity it warrants to do it. Most of the things I work on 
target environments with a compiler capable of at least C89 plus a core 
subset of the functionality added in C95 and C99 - mostly the bits that 
many compilers were already supporting in the early 90's such as 
'inline' and (gulp) C++ line-end comments. Unless there are supported 
platforms which require it, it seems a bit excessive to have code 
complexity to work with compilers which support only C as it was 27 
years and 2 major language standard revisions ago.

-- 
J. J. Farrell
Not speaking for Oracle.

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