[duped]

> People just don't use this because they want to write "portable" "standard" C

Something that bothers me is the Venn diagram of people that think abstraction is slow and error prone and people that only write portable C.

How many C implementations do you actually need to compile against? I don't think I've seen more than 3 outside Unix software from the 90s. Using non portable extensions is in fact totally doable for your application and you should probably do it, and just duplicate/triplicate code where you have to. It's not that hard to write and not hard to read.

[pjmlp]

Back when I still wrote C at work, it meant Aix xlC, HP-UX aCC, Solaris Forte, Red-Hat Linux GCC, Windows MSVC and C++ Builder.

Nowadays most are indeed clang and GCC forks, or MSVC.

[duped]

That's what I mean, I've seen enough autoconf "checking for <feature that totally works in every compiler you care about>" noise to know it's mostly pointless in this day in age.