Re: compile broken by recent check-in

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 21 May 2010, at 21:18, David Chisnall wrote:

> On 21 May 2010, at 21:04, Doug Simons wrote:
> 
>> Is anyone else experiencing this problem? It seems to be caused by the 
>> change to base/Source/ObjectiveC2/runtime.h in r30438. Reverting that one 
>> change enables the build to proceed. I'm seeing this problem on both Windows 
>> and Linux:
> 
> I'm not sure why this change is needed.  If you don't have stdint.h, then you 
> don't have a standards-compliant C implementation.  We don't have similar 
> guards around stdio.h, string.h, and so on...


The other files have been in the 'standard' since the C language was invented 
in the early 70s and in the ANSI standard since the late 70s .. around 35 year, 
so there's really no point checking for their presence.  But stdint.h has only 
been standard for ten years or so... it's a matter of how much backward 
compatibility you are going to do.

Psychologically, ten years is a nice round number (and given the rate of 
obsolescence of technology it's two or three generations), so my own feeling is 
that we should not be overly concerned with maintaining compatibility with 
things which are over a decade out of date.

In this case, my preference would be for the code simply to include the header 
... on old systems we could either generate/install the header, or require 
people to do that themselves.