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

[Pebay, Philippe P]

I think there is a more fundamental reason why we should drop VS 6.0 support. Being 10 years old, this compiler lacks C++ features which
developers may want to (and do) use. As a result, we have to write more complicated or less efficient code. This is not good.

P
--
Philippe Pébay
Sandia National Laboratories

________________________________________
From: vtk-developers-bounces at vtk.org [vtk-developers-bounces at vtk.org] On Behalf Of Bill Lorensen [bill.lorensen at gmail.com]
Sent: Friday, April 17, 2009 11:35 AM
To: Thompson, David C
Cc: VTK Developers; VTK Users; Berk Geveci
Subject: Re: [vtk-developers] [vtkusers] Can we drop Visual Studio 6 support?

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.

Bill

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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