On Wednesday, March 11, 2015 at 11:53:11 AM UTC, Brian Smith wrote: > <bo...@mozilla.com> wrote: > > Also, from what I can tell of the C++ features that gcc-4.8 enables (from > > [1]), none of them are available until MSVC 2015. > > It seems likely that we'll be supporting MSVC 2013 until the next ESR, so I > > don't see that moving to 4.8 gives us any immediate benefits. > > > > [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Using_CXX_in_Mozilla_code > > ESR is also an incredibly wasteful drag on Mozilla development. When > ESR was first proposed we agreed, as far as I understand, that we > would NOT hold back improvements to the real Firefox for the sake of > ESR. In fact, it is counterproductive to hold back changes like this > for ESR's benefit because doing so makes it *harder* to backport > changes to ESR. For example, imagine if you had updated the Chromium > code after the next ESR branched, and then 12 months later a serious > and hard-to-fix security bug in the old Chromium code was found*. It > would be much less work to backport the patch is the minimum compiler > version for ESR was as similar to the minimum compiler version for > real Firefox.
Right, that's sort of the point I was trying (and probably failing) to make. Given that we (and probably Chromium) would be unlikely to drop MSVC 2013 before our next ESR anyway, then a complex security fix that used new c++ features is less likely. Unless the fix were in code only compiled with gcc, in which case we'd need to move to gcc-4.8 and look at alternatives for ESR. Moving to 4.8 now gives us no new features and causes at least some work for maintainers and from what I can tell, work to upgrade some of our build systems. If the policy is to not hold back improvements for the sake of ESR then the corollary to that should be that we don't push for changes in the ESR version just to protect it later. I'll be happy to help move us to 4.8 or later when we are looking to make MSVC 2015 the minimum. _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
