[to3m]

Standards nonconformance has always been less of a problem when gcc does it.

(Of course, part of that is presumably that gcc's nonconformance is generally useful, as in this case...)

[pjmlp]

FOSS developers like to forget that GCC is also full of language extensions and nonconformance issues.

This is pretty standard type of issues for any ANSI/ISO language regardless of the vendor.

Oh boy the joys of doing C and C++ development across multiple OS in the late 90's with commercial compilers.

[snogglethorpe]

Gcc was pretty wild-n-wooly back in the '90s, and seemed to add language extensions left and right, but that attitude changed quite a while ago, and it's very good about standards conformance these days (part of the reason for this, of course is it's no longer so necessary: many of these extensions have picked up by the standard in one form or another).

In my experience, gcc is also significantly better with standards conformance than VC++, either with default settings or with strict warning/conformance options turned on. [I was on a team doing shared g++/vc++ develeopment, and it fell to me to fix all the code checked in by devs using non-standard VC++ extensions... way, way, way too much time... >< ]

[lmm]

The example given in the "story" is useful.

[to3m]

Not terribly - you can get the same effect with `return Thing()'. This doesn't seem as useful as the similar bug/extension that allows pre-C11 scoped enums (see, e.g., http://stackoverflow.com/questions/441552/scope-resolution-o...).