[cfe-dev] RFC: Default language standard mode policy

[Joerg Sonnenberger via cfe-dev]

On Wed, Jun 29, 2016 at 12:09:37PM -0700, Richard Smith via cfe-dev wrote:
> Hi all!
> 
> I'd like to establish a policy for Clang's default language standard (if
> none is specified with -std), as follows:
> 
>   Clang defaults to the most recent published standard for the selected
> language that it fully implements.
> 
> The practical impact of this is that clang++ will default to C++14 for C++
> compilations (for version 3.9 onwards) and will default to C++17 once our
> implementation support is complete and the standard is published (whichever
> happens later).

I don't have a problem with the C11 default, because the language impact
is minimal. That's quite different from C++ though and I am very
reluctant to update the default language even to C++11. There is a lot
of code in the wild that doesn't compile anymore due to stupid changes
like user-defined string literals or the narrowing (warning) changes.
Even worse are the nothrow changes for destructors, which silently break
valid C++03 code.

Joerg