On Tue, Oct 31, 2017 at 11:38:48AM -0600, Jeff Law wrote: > 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.
I'm sure its a project one can spend arbitrary amounts of time on if one wishes or is payed to do so. That said I'm considering the scope here limitted to running configure / make / make install with the defaults and taring up the result. I'll admitt I've only done that on linux where it was easy, but people do keep AIX and Solaris building and they really are supposed to be buildable in a release. However at some point it can be less work to do this than to beat C++98 into doing what is desired. > >> 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. certainly, but I think it makes sense to understand how many people might be negatively effected by a change, and to what degree before making that decision. > >> 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. Also as a counter example what brought this thread up is Richard wanting to use something from C++11. So in that particular case it probably would make something better. thanks Trev > > Jeff
