Everyone knows the Penguin mascot OS, Linux and its “Benevolent Dictator for Life” and foundator Linus Torvalds.
When he created what would become the Linux kernel in 1991, M. Torvalds used what was the best seller of programming language, C, in its 1989/90 standard version, also called C89, to develop its kernel.
Since then, the kernel remained in C89 even though the C language evolved. Thanks to its backwardness with earlier versions, there was no trouble so far compiling or running programs under different compliance.
Recently tho, following a patch fixing a bug in the USB subsystem, and the potential issues M. Torvalds has reconsidered brushing up a bit the linux kernel core language to a more recent version.
At first, considering moving to C99, some experts argued that it could be possible to upgrade the kernel to any recent C standard version.
But, due the little improvement it would actually bring to the kernel and as well due to some issues with some gcc compiler versions with the very latest version of C, C11 would be a nice compromise.
Which M. Torvalds seems to have agreed as he finally declared: “Ok, somebody please remind me, and let’s just try this early in the 5.18 merge window“.
Which will occur later this year.