What is the point of the C99 standard?

Question

C99 adds several useful features to the language, yet I find it difficult to recommend any practice which depends upon C99. The reason for this is because there are few (any?) a

Answer 1

MSVC does not, nor will it probably ever, support C99. But Microsoft has little incentive to update their C compiler. It's not like they will lose much business over it.

But there are plenty of compilers that have support for C99.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C99#Implementations

Regarding gcc:

http://gcc.gnu.org/c99status.html

You are right that perhaps C99 is not useful for library code (and may never be without Microsoft's support), but if you're working on an in-house or personal project where you can pick the compilers and tools, then the portability is not much of an issue.