On Wednesday 16 October 2013 12:05:51 Olaf van der Spek wrote:
On 16-10-2013 0:20, Andrey Semashev wrote:
On Tuesday 15 October 2013 23:05:45 Olaf van der Spek wrote:
What's the concrete advantage of defaulting to Vista? Performance?
Yes, mostly. Vista has builtin support for condition variables and read/write mutexes, for example. Compiler-based TLS can be used safely with dlls. GetTickCount64 can also be useful in some contexts and is difficult to emulate. All these features will find their use at least in Boost.Sync and Boost.Log (the latter currently uses its own protocol for enabling use of these APIs, but it will be ported eventually).
If a program targets >= Vista, aren't defines available you could check anyway?
Not necessarily. For example, the macros are typically not defined when building Boost itself. Also, if a program relies on Boost to provide abstraction over the OS API, it may well omit defining those macros too.