[vlc-devel] [PATCH 09/12] network: io: Remove VLA usages

[Steve Lhomme]

On 2020-12-10 8:25, Steve Lhomme wrote:
> On 2020-12-09 17:49, Rémi Denis-Courmont wrote:
>> Le mercredi 9 décembre 2020, 17:47:18 EET Hugo Beauzée-Luyssen a écrit :
>>> On Wed, Dec 9, 2020, at 4:12 PM, Rémi Denis-Courmont wrote:
>>>> Le mercredi 9 décembre 2020, 11:38:42 EET Thomas Guillem a écrit :
>>>> Likewise, production builds must be done with GCC or Clang again for 
>>>> the
>>>> optimisations, as well as for licensing reasons (which we've covered
>>>> multiple times in the past already).
>>>
>>> Who said anything about changing anything about the release builds?
>>
>> I don't think anybody said anything but what's the point in supporting a
>> compiler that won't be used for releases?
> 
> * To have more Windows developers by making it easy for them to just 
> open Visual Studio and start hacking in VLC.
> * To get different compiler diagnostic. Just like having clang in 
> addition to GCC is helping find issues GCC doesn't report.
> * Possibly have more code analysis tools

Another non-negligible possibility would be to build with the Windows 
SDK rather than the mingw64 hacked/guessed SDK. That could help validate 
or invalidate the code we're doing with the real thing. It will also 
help improve mingw64 (on which we contribute a lot) where there are issues.

A simple example: building for UWP with restricted APIs in MSVC if you 
use something forbidden it will just not compile or link. In Mingw64 for 
a long time you couldn't tell which things are allowed or not (I fixed a 
lot of that but human error is always possible).