[Development] Accelerating deprecation of MSVC 2017

[Thiago Macieira]

On Wednesday, 21 August 2019 05:31:55 PDT Alex Blasche wrote:
> What is the hurry for this decision? Generally, we look at download figures
> as base line and decide based on them. Thiago, are we currently facing
> issues where we cannot further fix/work around problems or is this request
> closer to the nice-to-have camp? We'd need a reason why we potentially want
> to annoy half the people downloading Qt on Windows. Note that I don't know
> what the current download figures and just want to highlight the Qt user's
> perspective.

Because 5.15 is LTS, I'd like to make sure we don't lock ourselves to MSVC 
2017 until 2023, when that compiler will be coming up on 6 years of age.

We should be doing this exercise for all compilers we support. It just 
occurred to me to send this about MSVC because of the mutex-on-statics 
discussion in the QStringView thread.

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com
  Software Architect - Intel System Software Products