On 10/31/2017 11:22 AM, Eric Botcazou wrote: >> I don't see a reason not to other than a pretty small amount of work >> each time we make a release. > > I'm not sure it would be so small an amount of work, especially on non-Linux > platforms, so this would IMO divert our resources for little benefit. Having done this for years on HPUX, yes, it takes more time than one could imagine. THen I went to work for a company that did this for hpux, solaris, aix, irix and others and well, it was very painful.
> >> Well first this would only matter to the 0.01% of people who want to do >> that on AIX or Solaris machines, not the vast majority of possible >> contributors who already use clang or gcc as there system compiler. > > Yes, but we're GCC, not Clang, and we support more than Linux and Darwin. Very true. > >> Thirdly making it easier to work on the compiler and understand it makes >> things easier for those possible contributors, so if being able to use >> C++11 advances that goalthings could be better over all for possible >> contributors with different system compilers. > > I don't buy this at all. You don't need bleeding edge C++ features to build > a > compiler and people don't work on compilers to use bleeding edge C++. Using > a > narrow and sensible set of C++ features was one of the conditions under which > the switch to C++ as implementation language was accepted at the time. Agreed that we need to stick with a sensible set of features. But the sensible set isn't necessarily fixed forever. Jeff