[Development] Platform / compiler support

[João Abecasis]

Thiago Macieira wrote:
> On Monday, 7 de November de 2011 15:31:27 João Abecasis wrote:
>> For the time being, I'm interested in the most basic level of support:
>> ensuring the code compiles, keeping language and compiler feature #ifdef's
>> at a maintainable (minimum) level, while still allowing developers to make
>> the most of the language, compilers and standard libraries.
> 
> So what are the features we're looking for?

Personally, I have some changes that use variadic macros and I'd like to reduce what we use QT_NO_STL for.

However, the first discussion is not about specific features. It is hard to make a proposal, for instance, to allow use of variadic macros in Qt, if we don't have a base view of the compilers we want to support. Implicitly this is also about the features those compilers support, we can make this explicit later on. 

> And what are we going to do with this list of compilers? Is it when someone 
> wants to use a feature X of the compiler, we check if the minimum set supports 
> it and, if it does, the feature can be used without #ifdef?

Features that are widely supported should be considered part of the language as we see it and unconditional use allowed. So, the answer should be yes. That said, common sense is still expected (and still unspecified), so even widely supported features may end up requiring #ifdefs.

Cheers,


João