[Development] Platform / compiler support

[Craig.Scott at csiro.au]

On 08/11/2011, at 9:06 PM, João Abecasis wrote:

> Dr Craig Scott wrote:
>> On 08/11/2011, at 1:31 AM, João Abecasis wrote:
>>> At the bare minimum, I think we should strive to support these compilers:
>>> 
>>>  - GCC 4.2 and up
>>>  - MSVC 2008 and later
>>>  - Clang (trunk)
>>> 
>>> On the page above I also put in a list of platforms, splitting them between Desktop, Embedded and Mobile. The latter two categories only have a placeholder row, while for Desktop I put in the following platform-compiler mappings:
>>> 
>>>  - Linux: gcc 4.4 (Debian stable)
>>>  - Microsoft Windows 7: MSVC 2008
>>>  - Mac OS X Lion: gcc 4.2, clang 2.9
>> 
>> I would strongly suggest that the LSB makes an appearance somewhere in the supported platform/compiler listing. To my knowledge, it is the only truly cross-distribution standard that exists for Linux.
> 
> Does the LSB specify a compiler?


Yes....... to an extent! The LSB builds are performed using the lsbcc and lsbc++ "compilers". I say "compilers" because what they generally do is forward to some other compiler with some additional flags merged into the command line to make that compiler build in "LSB mode". In the vast majority of cases, the underlying compilers are the GNU compilers (gcc and g++), but the LSB standard doesn't explicitly require that to be the case. That said, I think  you'd be pretty safe if you assumed GNU compilers for the purposes of the platform discussions for Qt. The LSB SDK provided by the linux foundation does indeed use the GNU compilers under the covers, so it seems reasonable for us to make this assumption within Qt.

--
Dr Craig Scott
Computational Software Engineering Team Leader, CSIRO (CMIS)
Melbourne, Australia