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

[Ville Voutilainen]

On 9 June 2017 at 23:31, Thiago Macieira <thiago.macieira at intel.com> wrote:
> 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).


So, what's your take on gcc versions? You seemed hesitant to drop
support for QNX 6
here: http://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/development/2017-June/030113.html
Are you suggesting we drop support for the MSVC versions you mentioned, but keep
GCC 4.7 support?