[vtk-developers] [vtkusers] Removing support for VS 8 and GCC < 4.1

[Bill Lorensen]

There may be customers that have products relying on older compilers.
Switching compilers is not always an easy process since they must port
their own code to the new compilers.

I think we should be conservative and only remove compilers when they
get in the way of progress of the vtk code base.

My 2 cents.

On Wed, Jun 10, 2015 at 10:07 AM, Peter Karasev <karasevpa at gmail.com> wrote:
> +1 for the aggressive point of view. C++11 makes life so much easier it's
> practically criminal to make VTK users suffer due to legacy support.
>
>        Peter Karasev
>
> On Jun 9, 2015 11:30 AM, "David Cole via vtk-developers"
> <vtk-developers at vtk.org> wrote:
>>
>> Definitely +1.
>>
>> Agree with what Utkarsh said, plus: people writing code should be
>> using modern tools for all sorts of good reasons: performance,
>> security, the tools themselves are just better...
>>
>> I would go so far as to say it's reasonable that the dev/trunk/master
>> branch of a project should only support the two most recent stable
>> compiler releases on any given platform. Even less for
>> dev/trunk/master if there is compelling reason to use a feature only
>> available in the most recent stable release.
>>
>>
>> Cheers for marching forward!
>> David C.
>>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Jun 9, 2015 at 9:58 AM, Utkarsh Ayachit
>> <utkarsh.ayachit at kitware.com> wrote:
>> > +1. People using those compiler can stick with previous versions of VTK.
>> >
>> > On Tue, Jun 9, 2015 at 9:37 AM Berk Geveci <berk.geveci at kitware.com>
>> > wrote:
>> >>
>> >> Hi folks,
>> >>
>> >> Sean graciously created a branch that removes support for Visual Studio
>> >> 8
>> >> and GCC < 4.1:
>> >>
>> >> https://gitlab.kitware.com/vtk/vtk/merge_requests/38
>> >>
>> >> GCC 4.1 was released in 2006 and VS 9 was released in 2008 (actually
>> >> late
>> >> 2007). I believe that this is very reasonable. We removed support for
>> >> VS 7
>> >> and GCC < 3 in 2013 and doing this regularly makes it easier to
>> >> maintain
>> >> VTK.
>> >>
>> >> Are there any major use cases for keeping these compilers? Unless I
>> >> hear a
>> >> good argument against merging this change in the next few weeks, I will
>> >> go
>> >> ahead and approve it.
>> >>
>> >> Moving forward, we will likely be more aggressive removing support for
>> >> older compilers. The VTK developer community really wants to leverage
>> >> new
>> >> C++ features (C++ 11) and newer library/compiler features (e.g. TBB,
>> >> OpenMP
>> >> 3 and 4) etc. We want to get there relatively fast and this will
>> >> require
>> >> dropping old compilers more quickly than before.
>> >>
>> >> Thanks,
>> >> -berk
>> >>
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