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For a project like Wikipedia, stability and continuity are far more important than latest and greatest feature support; in fact, there's an argument to be made

For a project like Wikipedia, stability and continuity are far more important than latest and greatest feature support; in fact, there's an argument to be made to avoid newer language features to ensure consistency, that is, if new features are used, they should be used everywhere at once. Else you end up with frankenstein code where every file could use a different style.

inglor_cz 2y ago
"Else you end up with frankenstein code where every file could use a different style." Yeah, this is a huge problem, but also, in the long run, inevitable. Plenty of Kernighan & Ritchie C code still out there...
- wbl 2y ago
  Almost none: ANSI was over 30 years ago and enough of an improvement people switched. If you mean C89 then yes, loads of it.
  - skissane 2y ago
    It helps there are automated tools for converting old style K&R function declarations to the new ANSI/ISO style, like protoize. But K&R C is now so dated, protoize was removed from GCC 4.5 and onwards. When (in a bout of idiosyncrasy) I wanted to convert some ancient K&R C to new style a couple of years back, I ended up putting GCC 4.4 in a Docker container to make it easier: https://github.com/skissane/protoize https://github.com/skissane/protoize
EasyMark 2y ago
For most projects outside of hobby projects, I feel this should be the default case, unless there are just some huge costs savings like “improved performance by 50% and now you can save money and scale down your AWS allocations!”