Comment by jstimpfle
2 years ago
I guess we can cook up some arguments about language purity and orthogonality. Introducing literals that create composite types might indeed create some difficulties for existing compilers that want to follow the latest standard.
What kind of difficulties? I don't understand why this would make any difference from a compiler's perspective.
It requires the compiler to be able to create types even before parsing, to have composite types without any source code location... you'd have to check with a specific compiler but it's not hard to imagine some potential issues.
There's also outward facing changes that introduce complexity... new literal types (+ new syntax) are required because otherwise old could would break (sizeof...) etc. etc. Existing parsers and tooling will have to be adapted, too...
Generally it's nothing that should be insurmountable, but why accept any of that if there's nothing to gain except a feature that is requested mainly by detractors of the ecosystem, a feature that goes squarely against the grain of the language...?
Any language is proud to be able to implement its features as library components around its core capabilities. Why introduce a new C type as a structure that can easily be defined as an aggregate type in source code?