Following GCC, Clang Looks To Default To C11

It looks like LLVM's Clang compiler will be defaulting to using the GNU's C11 standard for its next release.

Earlier this month I wrote about GCC 5 looking to default to GNU11/C11 over GNU89 for its GCC 5 release. That change ended up landing in SVN so the GNU Compiler Collection is finally providing C11 support by default. Last week the LLVM/Clang developers began discussing a similar move.

Richard Smith kicked off the discussion of defaulting to GNU11 for Clang's C language support. At least with Clang they've been defaulting to GNU99 rather than GNU89 so it won't be as big of a change, but still an important move for encouraging C11 adoption.

While the default change has yet to hit the Clang source tree, based on the discussions so far it looks like it will happen and should be a change for the upcoming LLVM 3.6 release. The C11 revision brought an alignment specification, multi-threading support, static assertions, and various other enhancements over the former C99 standard.