Generating binary wheels for Mac requires OS X version 10.6 which doesn't support c 11. I don't remember exactly why 10.6 was required. I think pip didn't accept packages that used 10.7 and started to compile everything from scratch. Also, compiling binary wheels for python 2 for Windows requires using a c compiler that doesn't support c 11. (Although I'm not sure if we need to support python 2.) I couldn't find a solution to this problem so I decided just to write an alternative implementation for those places in code where c 11 features were used.

Ergh. I think it's time to drop Python 2 support then. As https://pythonclock.org/ says, Python 2.7 will not be maintained past January 1st, 2020.

Ah, well I guess that solves the problem with python 2 support for Windows then. But the issue of generating binary wheels for Mac is still there. (OS X version 10.6 is required for all versions of python.)

Google hits show other people using C 11 with Python3 on macOS. And it wouldn't make sense for C 11 to be a problem, given Python's API is C.

The only issue I can find is https://docs.brew.sh/C -Standard-Libraries which only matters for installations upgraded through the years - fresh installs link against the C 11-capable libc .

Now that I try to install the bindings on Mac with python 3.6, everything seems to work when c 11 is used (and OS X 10.7 is required in the wheel). Last time I tried, pip refused to install the wheel. Maybe it was the old pypi server or old version of pip.