Hello! I'm NHO, aka NHOrus and I voluntarily participate in Gentoo's Modern C Porting efforts for fun. This necessery effort is semi-endless mire of ancient code, false positives, headaches and betterment of my distro. It can be both incredibly rewarded and incredibly frustrating (ncurses/gpm circular dependency, for one, is unfixable problem we appear to be stuck with forever). I do it because I want to help my distro, I find successes incredibly rewarding, and it helps with my programming and social skills, for I hate to speak to new people.
C, the antedevulian language of operating systems, has four dialects of interest: K&R C, C89, C99/C11/C17 and C23[^1]. This simplifcation smushes three standards into one, but everything that compiles under C99 will compile under C17. This limits near-endless amount of code rewrite, creation of new upstreams for dead packages and generally excessive, wasted effort to two reasonable, distinc