On Jul 15, 2011, at 2:00 PM, Antony Polukhin wrote:
Are really old and broken compilers still supported? Do we need them?
Some targets are only supported by really old compilers, like Metrowerks C++ circa 2000 for 68K Mac OS. PowerPC gets only one upgrade further if you insist on self-hosting (i.e. building on the targeted platform) outside of the IDE (in a scriptable command shell). (Whether anyone should be targeting these platforms in the first place is an advocacy conversation I won't entertain here.)
May be we shall get rid of compilers, that do not support template partitial specialization, ADL or SFINAE?
There's no need to "get rid of" anything. I simply refrain from using Boost libraries requiring SFINAE in programs targeting these platforms. Frequently I'm better off using something less header- heavy anyway, due to the slow I/O during preprocessing and poor inlining of function templates. As for already-written libraries like shared_ptr, I expect that some breakage may occur between releases. All I ask is that my patches be considered, and either accepted or appropriately critiqued. In fact, this has already happened and I was more than satisfied with the process -- although I'd prefer to use Git next time. :-)
If not, shall we try to make the tests pass (or at least compile) for them?
I certainly don't expect anyone other than myself to test Boost with Metrowerks C++ 2.4.1. Josh