RFC: Follow C Standard

[kuldeepdhaka]

Current code has some GCC specific portion. Should we make changes to our code that is valid as per C standard?

Example:

• Arithmetic operation on void pointer is not valid in C Standard

  void *abc;
  abc += 5;   // GCC treat void * as char *

• C Standard has no binary notation (0b)

  uint8_t abc = 0b000100; // 0b is GCC specific

• __attribute((packed)) and __attribute((aligned(<...>)) is GCC specific. Note: #pragma are available but are also implementation specific.

If we choose, C standard, In future, we have to make sure that all code in our C codebase should be valid as per C standard (and dont use any implementation specific features).

Edit: Added __attribute__ example.

[ChuckM]

Generally it makes a lot of sense to follow the C standard and it will make it easier to add support for things like clang in the future. You can turn off gcc features with -std= in the makefile. I'm a fan of C99 but I know that a lot of people like to mix things like C++ comments with // which C99 doesn't allow.

That said, since you're using ARM's toolchain you can just follow what they do.