Growing major version

Posted Feb 13, 2026 23:49 UTC (Fri) by alx.manpages (subscriber, #145117)
In reply to: Growing major version by mb
Parent article: The first half of the 7.0 merge window

ISO C uses x as a placeholder for the year of the release before the actual release. So, when ISO C23 was being developed, it was called C2x. Now that we're developing the next revision, it's called C2y, and it will eventually be C28 or C29. It wouldn't be too bad if it ends up being C30; we might just rename the temporary name to C3x if we reach 2030 without a release.

Growing major version

Posted Feb 14, 2026 0:51 UTC (Sat) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link] (1 responses)

I suspect the main reason that works for C is that there's only one significant release per decade, so most people only need to remember the first digit and don't care about the placeholder. Probably won't scale well to something with a release every two months.

(I think it's pretty confusing even for C++ with three releases per decade, where C++0x = C++11, C++1y = C++14, C++1z = C++17. Apparently they've now committed to a strict 3-year release cycle so the dates are predictable and shouldn't need placeholders, but GCC/Clang still refer to C++2a and C++2c anyway.)

Growing major version

Posted Feb 15, 2026 1:55 UTC (Sun) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

GCC and Clang do this (AFAIK) to differentiate "C++23 in progress" from "C++23 as standardized" in the run up to C++23 actually being completed.