:) [PS: out of curiosity, is 'quite' a typo for 'quiet' or a sort of play on words?]
Sorry, typo.
If my understanding is correct,
Hmm... when you say so I begin worrying :)
:-)
then:
* we need to detect whether the std lib was the one that shipped with vc6, 7 or 7.1 but:
Well, we can assume that the version shipped with VC6 is used with VC6 only, can't we?. It's newer lib versions that can be used with everything (maybe - please confirm this :)).
* we can't use _MSC_VER because it gets set to arbitrary values.
Yes. But I have a question: can we assume that the compiler is always detected *before* the library? Currently that's what the config system does. If it isn't a problem to cast this fact in stone, then the library config could just use BOOST_MSVC.
Yes, it's detected first, and yes we can use BOOST_MSVC to detect "real" msvc, but that doesn't help with the Intel config: As far as I can tell from Intels docs, all it's predefined macros are set to the same values irrespective of whether it's been installed on top of VC6, VC7, or VC7.1.
I would go further: I think once the compiler config has identified a compiler it should make available those information to the user (the library writer). That is, there should be e.g. a BOOST_GCC defined for g++, but not for Intel in gcc compatibility mode. That's something I need very often and needs just a simple #define for each compiler config file. Without that, say, for instance, I need to workaround a gcc bug (as it happened to me yesterday); then I have to do something like this:
#if defined __GNUC__ && !defined BOOST_INTEL_CXX_VERSION \ && /* not compiler xyz1 emulating g++*/ \ && /* not compiler xyz2 .... \ ... workaround code... #endif
when I could just do
#if defined BOOST_GCC ... workaround code... #endif
That also makes library code immune if new compilers that emulate g++ are introduced: you only change the config files (which need to be changed anyway) and the library code works as a consequence.
Yep, good idea, it just doesn't solve this issue :-( John.