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

[Bill Lorensen]

I understand your view as a developer. But, this is hard to justify to
a customer.

Bill

On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 3:10 PM, Pebay, Philippe P <pppebay at sandia.gov> wrote:
> 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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>>
>>
>>
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