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

[Mike Jackson]

On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 3:32 PM, Sean McBride <sean at rogue-research.com> wrote:
> On 4/17/09 11:19 AM, David Thompson said:
>
>>> 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
>
> My 2¢: time and developer energy are finite.  So while supporting an 11
> year old toolchain may be nice, what will we have to trade off?  It's
> 2009 and VTK cannot display Unicode strings! (not even accented Latin
> characters, let alone Asian languages).  Although I have not been
> following vtkUnicodeString's development, it's clear that the authors
> are spending time on VS6 issues instead of 'real work'.  That's a real
> shame IMNSHO.  I vote for dumping anything that is a) so very old and b)
> hindering forward progress.
>
> --
> ____________________________________________________________
> Sean McBride, B. Eng                 sean at rogue-research.com
> Rogue Research                        www.rogue-research.com
> Mac Software Developer              Montréal, Québec, Canada

I'll raise my comments to a nickel ;-)

I would say that if the compiler isn't supported by the vendor then it
probably shouldn't be supported by VTK/ITK/ParaView/CMake.

  GCC is an interesting case since it is "supported" by volunteers. My
guess is that in another year or so this same battle will be about GCC
3.x.

  Again, If there were a "plan" posted in a public forum, like the
Wikis, that states going forward which compilers are being supported
for which releases (current and future) would go along way to solving
these issues. And yes I'll let Kitware make those decisions because
this is one of those issues that is just going to go around and around
and there will be NO consensus. Someone make the decision and lets
move on.

----
Mike Jackson