How universally is C99 supported?

c c99 standards-compliance
Eli Bendersky picture Eli Bendersky · Sep 26, 2008 · Viewed 9.2k times · Source

How universally is the C99 standard supported in today's compilers? I understand that not even GCC fully supports it. Is this right?

Which features of C99 are supported more than others, i.e. which can I use to be quite sure that most compilers will understand me?

Answer

KovBal picture KovBal · Sep 26, 2008

If you want to write portable C code, then I'd suggest you to write in C89 (old ANSI C standard). This standard is supported by most compilers.

The Intel C Compiler has very good C99 support and it produces fast binaries. (Thanks 0x69!)

MSVC supports some new features and Microsoft plan to broaden support in future versions.

GCC supports some new things of C99. They created a table about the status of C99 features. Probably the most usable feature of C99 is the variable length array, and GCC supports it now. Clang (LLVM's C fronted) supports most features except floating-point pragmas.

Wikipedia seems to have a nice summary of C99 support of the compilers.

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