MSVC 7.1 and MSVC 8.0 are currently listed as "tested" in the Boost 1.65.1 release notes however there are a lot of projects that do not seem to support them well, if at all: http://www.boost.org/development/tests/master/developer/issues.html http://www.boost.org/development/tests/develop/developer/issues.html It looks like a large number of libraries will no longer build properly against them based on this report. I'm not sure what the procedure is to come to an agreement to drop a compiler in a release, but it looks like we should consider dropping msvc-7.1 and msvc-8.0. These are very old compilers for Windows development. Dropping them would also allow folks to more easily focus on failures in this report to make sure a release is as clean as possible and simplify the test matrix a little bit. Appveyor only supports back to Visual Studio 2010 at this point, so our ability to get pre-commit checks on compilers before msvc-10.0 is solely based on maintainer effort. I suspect this effort is no longer justified based on the age of the compilers. Thanks - Jim