Reece Dunn <msclrhd <at> hotmail.com> writes:
Loïc Joly wrote:
Thomas Witt a écrit :
vc6
I know that this compiler, however old, still has a wide usage in the industry. For instance, my previous work place (a 130000 employees company) used it almost exclusively, and most of its partners did so. In my new workplace, we switched 1/2 months ago, but still need to support it.
I agree that there are still a lot of companies that are still using VC6, mostly because of the effort that would be involved migrating to VC7 or VC7.1. However, Microsoft dropped regular updates over a year ago and have now dropped *all* support for this compiler.
Well, MS has a commercial interest in promoting its newest IDEs, but the sad reality is that VC6 is still in wide use today. I think the following (ongoing) poll in CodeProject gives much interesting info: Poll: Which IDE are you using for Visual C++ development? http://www.codeproject.com/script/survey/detail.asp?survey=537 Current results show that **39%** of respondents still cling to VC6 rather than 7.x or 8.0. Many of them do so out of necessity, because they can't assume porting some project to a newest IDE --and, curiously enough, some like VC6 IDE better !! So, we are not talking about a dead compiler or a couple of die-hard users. My proposal is that vc6 is marked deprecated but some care is taken not to break things gratuitously --in particular, foundation libs like config, test and core components as for instance shared_ptr. On the other hand, it is perfectly reasonable to assume that new libs won't support vc6, and that existing libs will add features not available to vc6 users. Retaining some sort of support for older compilers involves some work, but it is not such a gigantic effort IMHO, and the aforementioned poll shows there's still a potential vc6 users target to care about. Joaquín M López Muñoz Telefónica, Investigación y Desarrollo