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

Regarding C1x, I think it's worth noting that the standards committee is well aware that C99 has not been widely adopted and doesn't want to repeat the same mistakes (or to make the situation worse). From the C1x charter:

Unlike for C9X, the consensus at the London meeting was that there should be no invention, without exception. Only those features that have a history and are in common use by a commercial implementation should be considered. Also there must be care to standardize these features in a way that would make the Standard and the commercial implementation compatible.

And:

The original standard had a very positive reception from both the user and vendor communities. However, C99 has been not so widely received.