While I'm all for improved adherence to standards, the original linked bug report seems like a terrible case to pick a bone about attitudes towards standards compliance with.
There are real issues causing real problems which really should be fixed, very much including those related to standards compliance, but this doesn't appear to be one of them. The cure would be worse than the poison: Breaking existing codebases further, making it even harder to update legacy codebases to new toolsets, for an error made -- I'm guessing wildly here instead of verifying -- back in the VS6 era perhaps? That's a lot of code. What do we gain? We... make it slightly harder to accidentally write MSVC specific code. We already have a much, much better and more thorough tool for that: Compiling with a non MSVC compiler. I'd rather see the dev time put towards other issues.
As for not hitting C++11 standards compliance straight off the bat, they tried that for C++98 in VS6 and got burned by last minute changes. Yes, it'd be nice if they implemented everything correctly. The bug reports calling out problems with that compliance are very well and good. That said, they aren't billing themselves as feature-complete WRT C++11 yet, and I'd rather take this lackadaisical tempo than see yet another round of implementation mistakes which then need indefinite support.
Of course, this is probably colored by the fact that I don't get to use C++11 yet anyways -- out of the environments I'm currently stuck supporting, MSVC is at the bleeding edge of the curve.
Titling a submission "Visual C++ team's attitude to standards compliance" and pointing it at a bug report for some minor non-conforming behaviour tells us nothing useful about the msvc teams attitude to standards. Neither does the brief response from the team on that page. All it says is that there is an issue that they're not going to fix at the moment. Microsoft have a lot of customers, and those customers have a lot of code that they don't want to suddenly break without a good reason.
Do some work. Find or write a useful article investigating the c++ teams attitude to standards compliance and post a link to that. If it compared msvc to other compilers then I'd read it.
Is the implication that other teams are better with standards compliance?
Here is a much, much more serious issue. Variable length arrays of C++ types. Totally not in the C++ standard anywhere. Accepted by g++ and clang++, even if I turn on all warnings, and use '-std=c++11', which is supposed to turn off extensions. I have to add -pedantic to finally get a warning.
Now, I'm not saying they should break this code, but this is a much, much, much more serious unlabelled breakage of the standard, which is never going to get fixed, and goes back to the start of g++ and clang++.
struct X {};
int main(int argc, char** argv)
{ X a[argc]; }
--std=c++11 is not supposed to turn off all extensions, only the extensions that conflict with the standard. The VLA extension only applies to programs that would be malformed according to the standard, so it isn't turned off with -std=c++11. The -pedantic flag is for adhering to the standard exactly.
Gcc was pretty wild-n-wooly back in the '90s, and seemed to add language extensions left and right, but that attitude changed quite a while ago, and it's very good about standards conformance these days (part of the reason for this, of course is it's no longer so necessary: many of these extensions have picked up by the standard in one form or another).
In my experience, gcc is also significantly better with standards conformance than VC++, either with default settings or with strict warning/conformance options turned on. [I was on a team doing shared g++/vc++ develeopment, and it fell to me to fix all the code checked in by devs using non-standard VC++ extensions... way, way, way too much time... >< ]
"Use of a supplier's language extensions and non-standard-conforming features limits the portability of your code and can prevent you from choosing a new implementation supplier."
A sibling thread claims the same syntax is supported by clang, and allowed by gcc using -fpermissive, so it seems like that's not a practical concern in this instance.
Quite a valid observation from Stroustrup. But in this case the programmer has chosen to use a non-standard, vendor specific feature. So it is not clear how it applies here? (Especially given the cost of breaking existing code)
The programmer inadvertently used a vendor-specific feature. This is the key difference. Nobody writes perfect, standards-compliant code all the time, so the compiler needs to tell you when you are doing this.
Right, but it's a trivial fix, in this case at least. I'm happy as long as standard code works in their compiler. Considering how much trouble MS are having with getting their compiler standard-conformant, I'd rather they work on the more important features.
Their approach seems reasonable. If they fix this, they will break code that currently works by depending on this. They've not said that they will never fix it, just that they won't for the time being and will reconsider for a future release.
Those projects want to be warned of non-compliant code and they have chosen to have their build break on questionable constructs. I think that this is a weak argument for not issuing a warning.
Having said that the issue looks fairly non-urgent and inclusion in a later release would be perfectly reasonable.
C++ noob here. This reminded me of "Obscure C++ Features" [1] (discussion [2]) - the 'Placement new' feature.
Basically, we can allocate memory using malloc and then call the constructor on the allocated memory:
// Must allocate our own memory
Test *ptr = (Test *)malloc(sizeof(Test));
// Use placement new
new (ptr) Test;
// Must call the destructor ourselves
ptr->~Test();
// Must release the memory ourselves
free(ptr);
My point is: is possible that the explicit constructor call feature is intended to be used in this use case?
When I last worked with Windows and would end up on that Microsoft Connect site fairly regularly by Googling, I don't think I ever saw a response that would be satisfactory to the reporter. "Thank for for holding; your call is important to us" or "No", possibly rephrased a few times, was about your lot.
There are real issues causing real problems which really should be fixed, very much including those related to standards compliance, but this doesn't appear to be one of them. The cure would be worse than the poison: Breaking existing codebases further, making it even harder to update legacy codebases to new toolsets, for an error made -- I'm guessing wildly here instead of verifying -- back in the VS6 era perhaps? That's a lot of code. What do we gain? We... make it slightly harder to accidentally write MSVC specific code. We already have a much, much better and more thorough tool for that: Compiling with a non MSVC compiler. I'd rather see the dev time put towards other issues.
As for not hitting C++11 standards compliance straight off the bat, they tried that for C++98 in VS6 and got burned by last minute changes. Yes, it'd be nice if they implemented everything correctly. The bug reports calling out problems with that compliance are very well and good. That said, they aren't billing themselves as feature-complete WRT C++11 yet, and I'd rather take this lackadaisical tempo than see yet another round of implementation mistakes which then need indefinite support.
Of course, this is probably colored by the fact that I don't get to use C++11 yet anyways -- out of the environments I'm currently stuck supporting, MSVC is at the bleeding edge of the curve.