Daniel James wrote:
Hello all,
There has been some discussion on the development list about dropping all support for old C++ compilers. This will allow us to remove a lot of workarounds and simplify the code but before doing so it's a good idea to find out if anyone is still using them. Using boost with these compilers will cause a compile error in the config library (you can work round that using a custom configuration, but it's unlikely you'll be able to get much to work). The currently proposed versions for removing support are:
Digital Mars 8.40 and earlier Visual C++ 7.0 and earlier GCC 3.2 and earlier Intel C++ 5.0 and earlier
Which is, I think, a very cautious list. There's also a good chance that we might want to remove support for Borland C++ 5.x. Is there anyone still using those compilers?
Just to be clear, this doesn't mean we'll be fully supporting all compilers later than these. Old compilers such as Visual C++ 7.1 and gcc 3.4 won't have a config error and we won't deliberately remove support, but support will be patchy. Many libraries (especially new ones) don't support those compilers, and we also don't have any formal testing for them, so if a new change breaks something, it might not be noticed.
If you are still using compilers which are a little more recent than the ones listed above, it might still be worth mentioning in case we consider removing support for them in the future.
Thanks in advance for any response,
Hmmm - take for example the serialization library. Little by little over time, tweaks base on boost.config have been accumulated so they are all over the place. These tweaks depend on macros defined in boost config with something like "if compiler < borland 5.0" or something like that. Would all these "old macros" be eliminated? This of course would totally break compilation of the library on any platform. Is this the case? Who would fix all this? What advantage would it bring to anyone. Of course newer libraries don't support this - but boost has never required support of anything other the standard C++. Sorry, I don't think I'm understanding this. Robert Ramey
Daniel James