[Development] Dropping older compilers for Qt 5.10 (was: Qt 5.10 pre-built bunaries)

[Thiago Macieira]

On Wednesday, 7 June 2017 15:10:57 PDT Thiago Macieira wrote:
>  * Unicode strings
>  * unrestricted unions
> 
> Another benefit is that MSVC 2017 and 2015 are supposedly binary compatible
> with each other. With care, we can even use this feature in Qt.
> 
> If we require MSVC 2015 with the most recent update (which is over a year
> old now), in addition we get:
>  * attributes
>  * thread-safe statics (finally! could drop the fallback from
> Q_GLOBAL_STATIC! oh, wait, Apple...)
>  * uniform initialisation (without having to check if it really works)

Another benefit of requiring MSVC 2015 with updates:

Our sources can FINALLY be UTF-8 clean, as that compiler understands the 
/utf-8 option. That means QStringLiteral(x) can contain any arbitrary UTF-8 
text where x is.

As well as string concatenation:
	QStringLiteral("Hello " "world");

===>
I move we drop MSVC 2013, MSVC 2015 RTM and Updates 1 & 2 (Update 3 is the 
current version and is fine).

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com
  Software Architect - Intel Open Source Technology Center