On Mon, 16 Feb 2004 09:31:25 -0500, David Abrahams wrote
"Victor A. Wagner, Jr." <vawjr@rudbek.com> writes:
when it comes to writing/updating the libraries, support of these fossils is staggeringly expensive.
Agree...
I just want to point out that the "fossils" with major conformance problems are still in extremely wide use in industry, and some are
I agree with Dave on this point. The issue for projects, especially with a large working source base deployed to the world, is that the time to upgrade isn't obviously worth the cost and risk of upgrading. It's usually not the development effort that is the problem, it's the testing costs.
even the latest official releases (see Borland). One of my most progressive and forward-thinking clients is still using vc6 for production work. They're anxious to upgrade to vc7.1, but haven't yet had the opportunity. I'd love to stop hacking around vc6 and borland limitations, but we should be sure we understand what we're doing when that day comes.
I think that the policy Spirit has adopted and I am using for date-time are reasonable going forward. Basically, the concept is to keep the current level of support for the library. Thus if a new feature is added to the library and it just works on the legacy compiler that's fine. If there are problems then that compiler that is noted in the compiler support information and that's it. This level of support still requires work to avoid breaking features that are currently working, but not as much. A year from now, I think we could go to the next step and drop support altogether for these older compilers -- meaning stop regression testing against the old compilers. Jeff