Obsolete C for you and me

Posted Dec 12, 2023 13:48 UTC (Tue) by rrolls (subscriber, #151126)
In reply to: Obsolete C for you and me by marcH
Parent article: Modern C for Fedora (and the world)

> old, unmaintained C code is just bad and dangerous. This was basically the main point of the article but you seemed to have missed it.

The work mentioned in the article is good work! Opting in to new checks that disallow bad patterns, and then updating code to fix all the errors, is almost always a good thing to do.

My comment wasn't responding to the article. My comment was responding to the statement "If you want this legacy code keep compiling, please use a 30 years old compiler."

> Also, you seem to dismiss backwards compatibility in other languages a bit quickly.

"Backwards compatibility" these days usually tends to mean "we'll make your code spam log files with warnings for a year and then stop working altogether until you fix it".

Real backwards compatibility means that the intended and documented behavior of an old version of something will be kept (at least, once any necessary opt-ins have been performed), even if it's deemed to have some flaws.

I'm not calling for _exact_ behavior, such as bugs, to be retained - just behavior that is documented and intended (or at least was intended at the time it was documented).