The C standard really isn't all that relevant in practice though, for instance the Microsoft C compiler had been trailing the standard by about 2 decades until

The C standard really isn't all that relevant in practice though, for instance the Microsoft C compiler had been trailing the standard by about 2 decades until quite recently but this didn't stop people from using it. Also most C code that's written to compile across gcc, clang and msvc most likely doesn't even build with -pedantic on gcc or clang. (eg in practice C is more like a language family, with an attempt to standardize a common core feature set and syntax as an afterthought and call that a "standard" - it's good that it exists, but it's hardly relevant or even useful for real world projects)