C2x

The C committee (AKA WG14 ) has now moved to construct the next real revision of the C standard. This is commonly referred to “C2x”, where the “x” is supposed to represent the digit of the year in which this new standard will appear. The whole procedure is ruled by the  C2x Charter that describes and fixes what kind of additions and improvements we want to see in C2x.

We have now published the first working draft that includes the changes that have been added so far in our October 2018 meeting in Pittsburgh. Other than for the C17 process, that was a pure bug fix release, such working papers introduce normative changes and are public and so I will keep up links to the ones that I find relevant, here. Until things will become too complicated to read, these working papers will be “diffmarks”, that is the C17 document with marked changes, strike-outs for removals and under-wave for additions. In particular the first of these  is still mostly C17, with only a few additions:

• C2x working paper, post October 2018 meeting

I will try to keep a list of changes and their status below. For discussion of all of these and other possible features that you like (or don’t) to be included in C2x, please refer to the appropriate channels. The best is to get involved in the standard’s process by adhering to your national standards body, come to the WG14 meetings and/or subscribing to the committee’s mailing list. Please have in mind that all contributions should be constructive, we aren’t fans of abusive language, insults or denigration.

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So far, the following changes have been integrated in the latest working paper:

• DR 476 volatile semantics for lvalues
• DR 488 c16rtomb on wide characters encoded as multiple char16_t
• DR 494 Part 1: Alignment specifier expression evaluation
• DR 497 “white-space character” defined in two places
• DR 499 Anonymous structure in union behavior
• DR 500 Ambiguous specification for FLT_EVAL_METHOD
• N2186  Evaluation formats of floating points
• N2260 Clarifying the restrict keyword
• N2270 Harmonizing static_assert with C++
• N2271 CR for pow divide-by-zero case

The following changes have been voted into C2x and we expect to integrate them before the next meeting (April 2019, London):

• TS 18661-1 Binary floating-point arithmetic (last working draft N1778 )
• TS 18661-2 Decimal floating-point arithmetic (last working draft N1814 )
• N2124 rounding direction macro FE_TONEARESTFROMZERO

The following changes have been voted into C2x with a 6 month period for possible comments or objections and we expect to integrate them after the next meeting (April 2019, London):

• N2293 Alignment requirements for memory management functions
• N2302 nextafterl(1.L,2.L)

There are many other ideas and documents floating around for inclusion into C2x. The following list is certainly not complete and biased by my personal preferences:

• • • Ease the definition of extended integer types, see  N2303
    • Add wide or bignum integer types
    • Add type generic interfaces for string functions to the C library, see  N2068
    • Add general constants for all data types
    • Extend the concept of  integer constant expressions  (ICE)
    • Remove ATOMIC_VAR_INIT
    • Revise atomics, see  N1955  and  N2064
    • Revise threads
    • Add attributes, see  N2269
    • Revise the memory model, see  N2294
    • Remove K&R function declarations and definitions
    • Remove one’s complement and sign-magnitude representations of signed integers
    • Remove the * form of VLA function parameter declarations
    • Improve array bound propagation and checks
    • Add a new calling conventions with error return for library functions that avoids the use of errno
    • New string representations for NaNs, see  N2290
    • Extend specifications for enum types, see  N2008
    • Remove or deprecate Annex K, see  N1969
    • Add a type aware print utility with format specification syntax similar to python
    • Add multibyte/wide string conversion functions, see  N2282
    • char8_t : A type for UTF-8 characters and strings, see  N2231
    • Adding the u8 character prefix, see  N2198
    • Harmonizing left-shift behavior with C++, see  N2161
    • __has_include  for C, see  N2101
    • add more TIME_ variants to timespec_get
    • Add wchar_t and FILE to all headers that use them
    • Add a simple specification of nullptr , similar to C++
    • upgrade C library headers with [static 1]