[Interest] MSVC not-the-latest: are you using it? why?

[Thiago Macieira]

On Monday, 23 January 2023 09:19:07 PST Scott Bloom wrote:
> One of the limiting factors in general, is we would prefer NOT to have 2
> compilers with very different c++ support.  There have a been a number of "
> C++11/14/17 etc" that have been partially implemented on one, and not on
> the other.  Unfortunately, NOT always protected by the "version switch".
> 
> The biggest one that hit me, is std::make_unique which didn't exist on g++
> but did on windows.  So if used, when you go build on linux, you have to
> clean up your code.  There have been some others through the years.
> 
> So in general, we try to keep their abilities as close as possible,

Thank you Scott, but you've answered the inverse of my question.

You're talking about the ability to write code given a compiler you can't move 
from and what one needs to do to keep that working. I am asking why people are 
staying with the older one, if the new one is available and shouldn't (in 
theory) produce a compatibility burden with already-compiled code.

On Linux, people generally use the compiler that their Linux distribution 
offers and many of them don't upgrade to another GCC major version after the 
initial release (CentOS/RHEL with the devtoolset being a notable exception). 
This implies to us that if a Linux distribution from 2018 is still a valid 
development environment, then GCC 8 must work too.

But on Windows and on macOS, the compiler updates are disconnected from the OS 
version. Hence the question: if you can install compiler version Y using the 
same mechanism you installed version X, why won't you?

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com
  Cloud Software Architect - Intel DCAI Cloud Engineering
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