Wes,
We do have customers that use older Linux versions and use Vertica
compiled without c++11. Since we would like to integrate parquet-cpp
into our product, we need to deal with the c++11 dependency.
We can maintain this as a separate branch, if you and others don't feel
it's worthwhile incorporating this functionality into the master.
Thank you,
Aliaksei.
On 03/07/2016 12:02 PM, Wes McKinney wrote:
hello,
responses inline
On Mon, Mar 7, 2016 at 8:22 AM, Aliaksei Sandryhaila
<[email protected]> wrote:
Hi Wes and Julien,
At this point, parquet-cpp is heavily reliant on C++11 features and
semantics. Believe it or not :), there are plenty of companies still
running older versions of Linux that do not support C++11. Removing this
dependency will make parquet-cpp usable (and much more appealing) to them.
Just to be clear -- is this a problem for you specifically? Any other
context would be helpful.
It is not especially difficult to set up a portable C++11 build
toolchain even on Linux distributions that do not have a new enough
gcc in their package repository. Both Impala and Kudu have recently
developed isolated 3rd-party toolchains to facilitate development and
packaging for these systems. See for example
https://github.com/cloudera/native-toolchain
We would like to make parquet-cpp C++09 compatible. The end goal is to have
a library that can compile with and without --std==c++11 flag. There are two
parts of this process. The first one is to redefine or remove C++11
keywords, such as auto, unique_ptr, std::move, or for( : ) loops. The other
part is to evaluate our use of C++11 features that are harder to replace,
such as shared_ptr, make_shared(), etc., and either write our own
implementation for this or modify code where appropriate (such as replace
shared_ptr with unique_ptr where possible).
We can do this either by maintaining a separate feature branch and
periodically pulling new code from parquet-cpp; or by implementing the
compatibility functionality directly in parquet-cpp (all future PRs will be
tested for c++09 compatibility during CI builds).
I'm fairly negative on dropping C++11 in trunk / main library
development -- it would be a hardship for me personally, and
additionally deter software engineers who are increasingly coming back
to C++ development because of C++11/14.
This leaves legacy C++<11 projects that wish to use parquet-cpp as a
3rd-party dependency somewhat out in the cold. One approach is to
provide a wrapper API for projects that cannot interact with APIs that
use C++11 facilities (like std::unique_ptr). The same approach could
be used to provide a C API for the project. A wrapper API would be
much easier to maintain and test without having a separate branch to
keep in sync -- there might be some pitfalls here that I'm not aware
of so let me know what you think.
Thanks,
Wes
What are your thoughts on this?
Thank you,
Aliaksei.
