Re: Back branches vs. gcc 4.8.0

On Fri, Apr 5, 2013 at 11:14 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> It also strikes me that we ought to take this as a warning sign
> that we need to work on getting rid of coding like the above in favor
> of genuine "flexible arrays", before the gcc boys think of some other
> overly-cute optimization based on the assumption that an array declared
> with a fixed size really is fixed.

The traditional argument against that has been that that's a C99
feature. However, since it appears that even MSVC supports flexible
arrays (which are described as a "Microsoft extension", so may not
have identical semantics), it might be possible to do this across the
board without contorting the code with preprocessor hacks. That's
something that I'd certainly be in favor of pursuing.

--
Peter Geoghegan