Dear all, I was reading the discussion, and I use cross-compilation on a regular basis for embedded system. Maybe this is a simple avenue that could be tried while using modern C++ and still provide support for systems on which only old compilers and libraries are available for developers. @Mark Borgerding: do you think that would be feasible in the setup you must maintain ?
It is really not that hard anymore to cross-compile. - all the best, On Wed, May 6, 2020 at 5:40 PM Clifford Yapp <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Tue, May 5, 2020 at 11:54 PM Rob McDonald <[email protected]> > wrote: > >> >> My user who recently had problems because my app developed a dependency >> on std::regexp -- which isn't really supported by gcc 4.8. The problem is >> less the compiler and more the standard libraries installed on the >> machine. He is not building on the big machine -- he builds on a local vm >> on a laptop and then transfers the binary up. They also prefer to do their >> local setup on images that are as similar as possible to the computation >> environment. Perhaps they could set up local compilers and libraries, but >> that is a much bigger hassle than using system installed standard libraries. >> > > For Redhat, Developer Toolset ( > https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_developer_toolset/7/html/7.0_release_notes/dts7.0_release) > provides a newer compiler environment using the "scl enable devtoolset-X > <command>" mechanism. We've recently switched to C++11 as a minimum > standard, and you're correct that gcc 4.8 isn't up to the job. > Fortunately, so far devtoolset has worked fine. > > I certainly understand the value to large customers of stability, but even > for them the costs of maintaining code tied to an older standard grow ever > greater over time. As the broader community moves on and your available > pool of contributors trained to (and willing to!) develop in older coding > environments shrinks, you gradually lose the synergies of community which > are such an important part of open source (or even software development in > general.) We've generally been pretty conservative about upgrading > standards, but we finally reached a point where the difficulty of > implementation and maintaining significant user features without the > support of modern C/C++ was so great compared to the job of setting up > something like developer tool-set that we could no longer justify sinking > the time and effort into accommodating the limitations of the C89/C++98 > standards. > > Cheers, > CY > >
