The C23 edition of Modern C

Can someone link me to an article that explains why C is basically frozen at C99 for all practical purposes? Few projects worth talking about leverage features from C11 and newer

C99 is still new! Microsoft tried to kill C by refusing to implement anything that wasn't also in C++. MSVC was 16 years late implementing C99, and implemented only the bare minimum. Their C11 implementation is only 11 years late.

I suspect that decades of C being effectively frozen have caused the userbase to self-select to people who like C exactly the way it is (was), and don't mind supporting ancient junk compilers.

Everyone who lost patience, or wanted a 21st century language, has left for C++/Rust/Zig or something else.

Most of us liking a good language just did not use MSVC. I do not think many people who appreciate C's simplicity and stability would be happy with C++ / Rust. Zig is beautiful, but still limited in many ways and I would not use it outside of fun projects.

I don't even use Windows, but I need to write portable libraries. Unfortunately, MSVC does strongly influence the baseline, and it's not my decision if I want to be interoperable with other projects.

In my experience, Windows devs don't like being told to use a different toolchain. They may have projects tied to Visual Studio, dependencies that are MSVC-only or code written for quirks of MSVC's libc/CRT, or want unique MSVC build features.

I found it hard to convince people that C isn't just C (probably because C89 has been around forever, and many serious projects still target it). I look like an asshole when I demand them to switch to whole another toolchain, instead of me adding a few #ifdefs and macro hacks for some rare nice thing in C.

Honestly, paradoxically it's been easier to tell people to build Rust code instead (it has MSVC-compatible output with almost zero setup needed).

The good news is that MSVC has C17 support (still missing important optional features, but at least some progress).

Microsoft basically sabotaged C99 by not implementing any of its features until around 2015 in the Visual Studio C compiler, and then still took until 2019 before they acknowledged their failure and started supporting more recent C versions again (MSVC is still reliably behind Clang and GCC when it comes to their C frontend though).

And back around 2010 MSVC still mattered a lot (which sounds weird from today's pov where most developers appear to have moved to Linux).

But OTH, few projects actually need C11 features (and C11 actually took one thing away from C99: VLAs - nothing of value was lost though).

C23 might be the first version since C99 that's actually worth upgrading to for many C code bases.

C11 gave us one very important thing: a standardized memory model! Just like in C++11, you can finally write cross-platform multithreaded code with standardized atomics, synchronization primitives and threads. Unfortunately, compiler/library support is still lacking...