Re: [boost] spirt not supported on msvc 7

From: Giovanni Bajo (giovannibajo_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-12-17 22:52:55

Robert Ramey wrote:

> My personal environment is Win23 with MSVC 7.0
> and gcc 3.2.   Building/testing my project with both
> these systems gives me the confidence that it is portable
> to a fairly wide range of environments including those
> that are missing a lot of features and those that are
> pretty picky about correct code.

Your testing environment does not include a very compliant compiler. Off the
top of my head, I can think of things like two-stage lookup or template keyword
to access dependent member templates which are not correctly implemented / not
implented at all in those two compilers.

> a) download spirit 1.6 into a separate directory so my
> directory structure will look like:

> to work BUT it requires that spirt 1.8 interface support
> everything that spirt 1.6 does.   I have to be able to count
> on that.  It seems that you've indicated that this is the
> case so I will proceed to try it.

Yes, Spirit 1.8.0 should be completely backward compatible.  Of course, you
cannot use those exciting new features available only in the new version.

> Assuming this works as I expect, this same explanation
> will be included in the release notes for those users of
> non-conforming compilers.

Exactly what we were suggesting.

> Of course I'm not extatic about this but
> a) its not that bad,
> b) it will get better with time and disappear in a graceful way,
> c) and most importantly, there doesn't seem to be any better
> alternative.

Another alternative would be to just rule out those old compilers. Of course,
if you have a whole library which already works on broken compilers, it seems
dumb to lose compatibility it just for a single feature (xml parsing). So I
won't argue with that. Other projects relying much more on Spriti will have to
live with that, and I think it's about time for people to drop broken
compilers.

Giovanni Bajo