Re: [boost] ATTN: Boost GSoC mentors and students: Continuous Integration for GSoC thoughts

Subject: Re: [boost] ATTN: Boost GSoC mentors and students: Continuous Integration for GSoC thoughts
From: Niall Douglas (ndouglas_at_[hidden])
Date: 2013-06-04 12:17:32

> Just curious: is Visual Studio support not included because not deemed
> important? Or not supported by this particular lib? Or not supported by
Travis CI
> for some reason? (licensing?)

As others have mentioned, Travis CI provides only Ubuntu 12.04 x64 instances
and none other. Interestingly, you /could/ actually package up MSVC and run
it under wine, but Travis CI's free service limits test runs to 20 mins and
getting wine et al installed in that time is probably more trouble than it's
worth.

Besides, I have another very good reason not to: my primary development
platform is Visual Studio. Why? It has the least C++11 support, but also the
best debugger. Any C++11 feature supported by the Nov 2012 CTP experimental
MSVC is easily supported in GCC or clang, whereas the converse is most
certainly not true.

A further factor is that the library is an async file i/o abstraction layer
intended for Boost, and the only true async backend currently is Windows
IOCP. Therefore, naturally development, and especially performance tuning,
currently focuses there.

Travis CI is really useful though for checking Visual Studio work: MSVC I am
told does not use an AST internally, and therefore permits C++ no other
compiler will allow. Very often I write template metaprogramming which MSVC
is absolutely fine with but chokes either GCC or clang or both. Travis CI
emails me to tell me when I've done that. This is very, very useful.

Niall

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