[vtk-developers] [vtkusers] Can we drop Visual Studio 6 support?

[Bill Lorensen]

David,

I love a challenge. Actually, with ITK, although we struggle with VS6
compiler errors, I can''t recall a runtime problem that was not a real
problem.

First look: the continuous vs6 platform with this ctest script:
http://www.cdash.org/CDash/viewNotes.php?buildid=314820 which has
PARALLEL ON is passing all tests. When you say this works on all other
platforms, how did verify that?

Bill

On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 3:06 PM, David Thompson <dcthomp at sandia.gov> wrote:
>> With ITK, if we have a VS6 or Borland or mingw or cygwin or VS7 or SUN
>> CC or 64 bit ICC or ... problem, we ask someone that has the compiler
>> to investigate a fix. Some errors are hard to fix without access to a
>> compiler.
>>
>> If you are still having a problem,  I have a VS6 compiler and can try
>> to track it down for you.
>
> Be careful, I might take you up on that. :-) For instance, we have
> turned off ParallelCxxTests TestMultiBlockExodusWrite on builds using
> MSVC6 because, while it works on all other platforms and runs cleanly
> under valgrind on Linux and Mac OS X, garbage gets written to the test
> file when compiled with MSVC6.
>
>        David
>
>
>> On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 2:19 PM, David Thompson <dcthomp at sandia.gov> wrote:
>> >> What sort of maintenance issues are you having?
>> > This type:
>> > http://public.kitware.com/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/Common/vtkUnicodeString.cxx?view=log
>> > There are *many* more examples (perhaps not all as humorously narrated),
>> > but the general problem is that the dashboard machines are the only way
>> > for many developers to test whether something will work with MSVC6. It
>> > can be quite irritating to check in something that should fix a compile
>> > problem and have to wait 1-2 hours before seeing the result.
>> >
>> >> I think the real issue is what compilers do the VTK installed base
>> >> use? You may have customers that are using 3rd party drivers/libraries
>> >> that are VS6. Actually, there is no way to know who the customers are.
>> > It would be nice to assume that customers who continue to develop with
>> > VTK read at least the digest, but I agree that some may note and it
>> > could be some time before we hear from them. I still think it is a good
>> > idea to drop VC6 not because it's irritating to debug build problems but
>> > because it can lead to obfuscated code as people rewrite bits here and
>> > there to accommodate old syntax and broken STL implementations.
>> >
>> >        David
>> >
>> >> On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 1:43 PM, Berk Geveci <berk.geveci at kitware.com> wrote:
>> >> > Hi folks,
>> >> >
>> >> > We are thinking of dropping support for Visual Studio 6. It is causing
>> >> > annoying maintenance issues since no one in the developer team uses it
>> >> > and since VS 6 supports only a subset of modern C++ features. Are
>> >> > there any objects? If yes, I would like to know why.
>> >> >
>> >> > Best,
>> >> > -berk
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