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

[David Cole]

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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>
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