On Sat, 4 Feb 2023, 17:01 Christopher Bazley via Gcc, wrote: > > Does the lack of support for Clang's nullability qualifiers in GCC indicate > a greater likelihood for my proposed feature to be accepted into GCC? No, I don't think so. I think it would be better to support the same qualifiers as Clang, not diverge in this way. I agree with Aaron Ballman when he said: "The proposal is largely experimental in terms of design and needs a stronger indication that a standards body really believes in this design (in terms of syntactic choices, at the very least) and data demonstrating how this feature catches bugs that cannot be caught by other features in the same space (not just due to missing diagnostics that are possible to implement)." In fact I agree with most of his comment at https://discourse.llvm.org/t/rfc-optional-a-type-qualifier-to-indicate-pointer-nullability/68004/16 I particularly agree that no new language extension is needed to express a pointer that can be null, that's just how pointers have always worked. A pointer that cannot be null is more deserving of special attributes or qualifiers to say that it has additional guarantees that aren't implied by just being a pointer. I am > determined to avoid putting a huge amount of my own time into another > inplementation, only to have it rejected again. > > If my proposal has little value to you (quite likely, if you are a C++ > programmer), please bear in mind that it is just a simple tool (like > 'const') that individuals can choose to use, or not. It entails only a > minor change to the semantics of one operator. Yes, it is contagious, but > nobody will be forced to use _Optional in their project, and it is easy to > hide using a macro. I don't feel that it deserves to be killed at birth. > Language extensions don't deserve to be added to a compiler just because somebody put a lot of work into them. > Please could someone direct me to the process and/or gatekeepers > responsible for allowing such an extension into GCC. > A thread like this on the mailing list is how such decisions get made.