[Development] Qt LTS & C++11 plans (CopperSpice)

[Thiago Macieira]

On Tuesday 30 June 2015 19:40:55 Ansel Sermersheim wrote:
> > Unless you're going to rewrite the entire GUI, widgets, networking and
> > other libraries from scratch, you're not going to get exception-safety.
> 
> Yes, many parts will need to be redone and we are starting with the
> container classes.

You may be underestimating the effort required. You'll need to spend a couple 
of man-decades of work to get this done...

> >> These are some of the limitations that frustrated us when using Qt in an
> >> existing codebase.
> > 
> > You're making trade-offs. One of them, given your presentation, is that
> > there's no current version of MSVC that will work with your codebase.
> > Another is that you're replacing a code generator by a lot of boilerplate
> > macros.
> 
> We do not feel that requiring a compiler to support C++11 is
> unreasonable. Our main issues with MSVC is with constexpr and expression
> SFINAE. MS has added partial support of constexpr for MSVC 2015,
> although they are still reported to have a few issues. They will get
> there eventually. No word yet on when expression SFINAE will be added.

And that's where we disagree. We feel that we have to be pragmatic and support 
compilers that people have access to. This is exactly why this thread started.

I'm not saying you can't do what you're doing. I'm simply saying it's a trade-
off. You're trading a potentially large userbase for the ability to use those 
C++11 features.

> Yes, we make use of macros as macros were intended to be used. We
> strongly believe the syntax for our macros is concise and clean, and
> that this tradeoff is worthwhile.

No doubt you do. But I still disagree.

My opinion is that a code generator is far preferable to boilerplate macros.
-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com
  Software Architect - Intel Open Source Technology Center