The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has published the new specifications for the C programming language. The standard has been known unofficially as C1X and was published officially as ISO/IEC 9899:2011. The standard, now referred to informally as C11, provides greater compatibility with the C++ language and adds new features to C (as indicated in the draft).

Those features include multi-threading, Unicode support based on the ISO/IEC TR 19769:2004 specification, additional macros for querying the characteristics of floating point types and the ability to use static assertions. The recently released revision also standardises many of the features that current compilers already support, as required by the draft.

The path of the specification through the standardisation process was uneventful. The ISO's Information Technology Task Force (ITTF) waved the standard through without further comment and the Final Draft Review was also accepted last October without any new comments. The standard is based on the N1570 draft passed in April 2011.

(crve)