C1x: When will it land, what to expect?

Question

C99 still isn't supported by many compilers, and much of the focus is now on C++, and its upcoming standard C++1x.

I'm curious as to what C will "get" in its next standard, when it will get it, and how it will keep C competitive. C and C++ are known to feed on one another's improvements, will C be feeding on the C++1x standard?

What can I look forward to in C's future?

Answer 1

The ISO/IEC 9899:2011 standard, aka C11, was published in December 2011.

The latest draft is N1570; I'm not aware of any differences between it and the final standard. There's already a Technical Corrigendum fixing an oversight in the specification of __STDC_VERSION__ (now 201112L) and the optional __STDC_LIB_EXT1__ (now 201112L).

Answer 2

I was typing a list of of features, but noticed the Wikipedia page on C1X has a pretty complete listing of all proposed changes.

On the ISO C working group posts 'after meeting' mailings on their website. One of the more interesting is this Editor's Report.

Answer 3

Here's a summary from the Wikipedia page:

• Alignment specification (_Align specifier, alignof operator, aligned_alloc function)
• Multithreading support (_Thread_local storage-class specifier, <threads.h> header including thread creation/management functions, mutex, condition variable and thread-specific storage functionality)
• Improved Unicode support (char16_t and char32_t types for storing UTF-16/UTF-32 encoded data, including the corresponding u and U string literal prefixes and conversion functions in <uchar.h>)
• Removal of the gets function
• Bounds-checking interfaces (Annex K)
• Analyzability features (Annex L)

Answer 4

I looks like gcc as of 4.6 is starting to look at C1x. They claim to have:

• Static assertions (_Static_assert keyword)
• Typedef redefinition
• New macros in <float.h>
• Anonymous structures and unions

Answer 5

Probably the best place to find the current status would be to look at the latest draft of the new version of the C standard. Warning: though it's coming directly from the committee, the server behind that link isn't always the most responsive...