0181-package-manager-cpp-language-version.md

Package Manager C/C++ Language Standard Support

• Proposal: SE-0181
• Author: Ankit Aggarwal
• Review Manager: Daniel Dunbar
• Status: Implemented (Swift 4.0)
• Decision Notes: Rationale
• Implementation: apple/swift-package-manager#1264

Introduction

This proposal adds support for declaring the language standard for C and C++ targets in a SwiftPM package.

Motivation

The C++ language standard is one of the most important build setting needed to compile C++ targets. We want to add some mechanism to declare it until we get the complete build settings feature, which is deferred from the Swift 4 release.

Proposed solution

We will add support to the package manifest declaration to specify the C and C++ language standards:

let package = Package(
    name: "CHTTP",
    ...
    cLanguageStandard: .c89,
    cxxLanguageStandard: .cxx11
)

These settings will apply to all the C and C++ targets in the package. The default value of these properties will be nil, i.e., a language standard flag will not be passed when invoking the C/C++ compiler.

Once we get the build settings feature, we will deprecate these properties.

Detailed design

The C/C++ language standard will be defined by the enums below and updated as per the Clang compiler repository.

public enum CLanguageStandard {
    case c89
    case c90
    case iso9899_1990
    case iso9899_199409
    case gnu89
    case gnu90
    case c99
    case iso9899_1999
    case gnu99
    case c11
    case iso9899_2011
    case gnu11
}

public enum CXXLanguageStandard {
    case cxx98
    case cxx03
    case gnucxx98
    case gnucxx03
    case cxx11
    case gnucxx11
    case cxx14
    case gnucxx14
    case cxx1z
    case gnucxx1z
}

Impact on existing code

There will be no impact on existing packages because this is a new API and the default behaviour remains unchanged.

Alternatives considered

We considered adding this property at target level but we think that will pollute the target namespace. Moreover, this is a temporary measure until we get the build settings feature.